The latest addition to my website is T. Rowland Hughes‘ Chwalfa (Out of Their Night). Hughes was an educationalist but, when he developed multiple sclerosis, started writing seriously, and wrote several novels, mainly concerned with life in the Welsh slate quarries, a play and a radio play, as well as poetry. This novel is about … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jun’ichiro Tanizaki‘s 武州公秘話 (The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi). This is another thoroughly enjoyable Tanizaki novel. It tells the tale of the fictitious Terukatsu, who will later become a great general. However, instead of giving a conventional account of a great general, which would have invariably … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marco Mancassola‘s Gli amici del deserto [The Friends of the Desert]. This tells the story of two best friends who venture out into the Arizona desert to find a shaman/healer to help them with their problems. The unnamed narrator has lost his job, in the Italian economic crisis, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jacques Roubaud‘s Le Grand Incendie de Londres (The Great Fire of London). I have mentioned before that one of the minor pleasures of reading novels is to find strange similarities between two books read consecutively. I first noticed this when, many years ago, I was travelling to work … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Efraim Medina Reyes‘ Técnicas de masturbación entre Batman y Robin [Techniques of Masturbation between Batman and Robin]. Having just read La vita erotica dei superuomini (Erotic Lives of the Superheroes), this book seemed a natural follow-up. However, masturbation, Batman and Robin barely feature in this novel and the … Read more
Spanish author Ana María Matute has died at the age of 88. I have four of her books on my website, three of which have been translated into English. I particularly enjoyed Paraíso inhabitado [Uninhabited Paradise], which you can read in Polish and Turkish, amongst other languages, but not in English. Her Civil War trilogy, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marco Mancassola‘s La vita erotica dei superuomini (Erotic Lives of the Superheroes). Don’t be put off, as I nearly was, by the title. This is not a silly, pastiche of superheroes. It is a serious book, where the main characters just happen to be superheroes. We follow the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Stefan Andres‘ Wir sind Utopia (UK: We Are Utopia; US: We are God’s Utopia). This is a short novel but a very fine one and Andres’ best-known novel. It was published illegally in Germany in 1942, while Andres and his wife were living in Italy. It takes place … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Frédéric Werst‘s Ward: Ier-IIe siècle [Ward: 1st-2nd century]. This is a stunningly original work, which purports to be an anthology, with extensive notes, of the literature of the Wards, an entirely imagined people, who write in Wardwesân, an entirely imagined language. Indeed, Werst wrote the texts in Wardwesân … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marina Warner‘s The Lost Father. Warner is best known as a cultural critic, writing primarily about myth, fairy tales and art. She has recently, for example, criticised Richard Dawkins for dismissing the power of fairy tales. However, she is also a fine novelist. This novel is told by … Read more