Paul Bailey had an interesting comment in The Guardian on literary prizes. I have commented on lit prizes before, e.g. here, and make no bones about the fact that I have not been terribly whelmed by the choices of the various panels. Bailey mentions the James Tait Black Prize and the The Somerset Maugham Awards, … Read more
Having just returned from a holiday in Montenegro, I thought that I would take the opportunity to talk briefly about Montenegrin literature. But first a quick word about Montenegro and our holiday there. The photo at left shows the Gospa od Škrpjela (Our Lady of the Rocks), visible from our bedroom window in Perast. The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abderrahman Budda Hamadi‘s Lágrimas de Alegría [Tears of Joy], a (not quite) novel from Western Sahara. I am not sure that there is even a novel from a Western Saharan writer though, as Conchi Moya shows in her blog (link in Spanish), there have been novels by Spaniards … Read more
When I first started my site, many years ago, it was not my intention to cover the world. My aim was to review (and therefore encourage others to read the books reviewed) of what I considered the most interesting novels since approximately the beginning of the twentieth century. I expected to be focusing on a … Read more
I recently read and posted on my site László Krasznahorkai‘s Sátántangó (Satantango). I had heard that famed Hungarian film-maker Béla Tarr had made a film of the book, which was 450 minutes long. This is not a film for watching with the family on Sunday night as it is as unremittingly gloomy and miserable as … Read more
Hesperus Press publishes an interesting and quirky selection of writings, both fiction and non-fiction. They are now having an Uncover a Classic Competition which basically means they are asking the public to submit the name of an out-of-print book that should be brought back into print. Obviously the book must have been published in English … Read more
When I first started doing this site, many years ago, one of the many gaps in my education that I found was a knowledge of Spanish and Latin-American literature. Even though I read Spanish and was reading novels in Spanish, my knowledge was generally limited to the novelists of the Latin American Boom and a … Read more
I have come across two lists recently on this subject. If you have visited my site, you will know that I am a glutton for lists. Two new lists relating to philosophy and the novel have recently appeared. The first is about whether it is still possible to write philosophical novels while the second is … Read more
Last week this blog was hacked, not once but twice. While writing my previous post, I noticed that everything was very, very slow, yet everything else on my computer was fine. When I went to look at the blog itself, it redirected to a Russian female body builder site. Interestingly enough, though the url was … Read more
The English have something of a reputation for being eccentric. Dame Edith Sitwell famously wrote a book on the topic and there seems to be a more modern one as well. There is also an interesting anthology of eccentrics, which links them with villains, which, of course, they sometimes are. Eccentricity is by no means … Read more