Amazon is not doing well in the British press, because it is evading UK tax by claiming that it is a Luxembourg company. The Luxembourg office employs 134 people while the UK operations employ 2265 people but it still only pays tax to Luxembourg. Obviously, most of Amazon UK’s customers are based in the UK, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thomas Brussig‘s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us). This had considerable success in Germany, as it was one of the earlier novels about the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, it takes a somewhat different approach from other such novels as the narrator of the novel claims that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Insurrection, another of O’Flaherty’s novels set against the backdrop of Irish history. The history in this case is the 1916 Easter Rising, a spectacular failure from the military point of view but which had profound political repercussions later on. O’Flaherty focuses his story on a small … Read more
The latest addition to my website is yet another Latin American novel that has not been translated into English (or any other language) – Miguel Gutiérrez‘ El mundo sin Xóchitl [The World Without Xochitl]. It deals with a subject which, while not unknown to the modern novel is less common than it might be – … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Las aventuras de Barbaverde [The Adventures of Barbaverde]. Yes, I am afraid yet another novel in Spanish that has not been translated into English (and many more to come, I regret.) This is now the eighth of his works that I have read, four of which … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antoine Abel‘s Coco sec [Dry Coconut], the first novel on my website from Seychelles and, unusually for Seychelles, where English is the predominant language, it is in French (and has not been translated). Abel is apparently known as the father of Seychelles literature, and published poetry and prose … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luigi Malerba‘s Il pianeta azzurro [The Blue Planet]. One of the joys of reading novels, particularly those from other countries, is getting different perspectives on the world. With Malerba, you certainly always get a different perspective – sometimes absurd, often fantasy, often paranoid, and always the view of … Read more
I have been following the rumblings around the Man Booker International Prize nominations and thought that I would add my ten cents’ worth. Michael Orthofer and Chad Post have raised their concerns more eloquently than I can. I own works by nine of the ten writers. However, I have only read one of them – … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle. This is one of those books (too many, I am afraid) that I should have read long ago but somehow never got around to doing so. While it is not a great novel, it is interesting, as, unlike most novels, it influenced government policy … 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.