The latest addition to my website is Koen Peeters‘ Grote Europese roman [Great European Novel]. This is a tongue-in-cheek novel that may be many things but is not the Great European Novel. Our hero is Robin, working for a Belgian firm n Brussels which makes gadgets (we know no more about it). Robin is in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Священная книга оборотня (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf). This is another of his books where the main characters of the book are in fact animals, albeit in human form. A Hu-Li, the main character, is a prostitute working in present-day Moscow but she is also … Read more
There is a bit of a furore going on at the moment following Janet Maslin’s Cool Books for Hot Summer Days, her summer reading recommendations in the New York Times. (I have often wondered why there should be special beach reading lists. Why can’t you just read the same books you read the rest of … Read more
The blog In lieu of a field guide has published a list of Philippine novels in English translation. Always interested in novels in translation from countries which I know little about, I checked the nine novels on the list. Sadly, only the two José Rizal novels showed up on the site of a well-known online … Read more
The Guardian has published a list of the most borrowed book from British libraries . I have only read one (the Mantel) and have no plans to read any of the others. I must admit there are many authors on the list whom I have never heard of. Meanwhile, ABE UK has a published a … Read more
Looking for a cheap book? How about this one? With shipping, it will cost you a mere $1 billion. If you one of those cheap people, you can get Beeson’s Revelation here (scroll down) for free.
The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Norah Lange: 45 días y 30 marineros [45 Days and 30 Sailors], yet another Latin American novel that has not been translated into English. This is the story, based on an actual voyage Lange made, of a young woman (the real Lange was twenty-eight) travelling from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergio de la Pava‘s A Naked Singularity. This made some best-off lists for the end of last year but not enough. The fact that it was self-published in 2008, is nearly 700 pages long and written by a US author of Colombian origin with an Italian name may … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Land. It is another novel set against the background of Irish history, in this case the disputes between landlords and tenants in the late nineteenth century, which gave rise to the formation of the Land League. It tells the story of the local Fenian group in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rodney Graham‘s The System of Landor’s Cottage. Rodney Graham is a Canadian artist who has experimented with manipulating found texts. He has taken existing works, such as Dr. No or Freud’s work on dreams, and added to them. In this case, he has written an entire novel from … Read more