Étonnants Voyageurs-Brazzaville report
At The New Yorker's Page-Turner weblog Siddhartha Mitter offers Terror Across The River: Letter From a Congo Literary Festival, reporting on the recent Étonnants Voyageurs festival in...
View ArticleMarilynne Robinson Q & A
In The New York Times Book Review this Sunday the Q & A has Marilynne Robinson: By the Book -- and one of her responses helps explain, I think, why I've never really warmed to her and her...
View ArticleDavid Cohen Prize
They've announced that Hilary Mantel wins David Cohen Prize for Literature 2013. This £40,000 is probably the major British author (as opposed to book) prize; it's unclear whether there...
View ArticlePublishing in ... South Korea
It's a similar story in many places, but this report, from what had seemed to be a fairly bookish place, is pretty troubling: as Kim Tong-hyung reports in The Korea Times, apparently For the...
View ArticleI Love Manchester United
A novel titled I Love Manchester United probably wouldn't raise eyebrows in the UK or even the US -- but when the title is actually من منچستر یونایتد را دوست دارم ('I love Man U' in Persian)...
View ArticleNew Vessel Press
This is exciting: a new publisher of translated fiction with a good-looking list coming out later this year: New Vessel Press. I'm looking forward to seeing these -- a nice selection...
View ArticleMen and women in fiction
At his Sapping Attention weblog Ben Schmidt looks at 'Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.' One tool is the awesome...
View ArticleSayed Kashua profile
In The Independent Boyd Tonkin finds Parallel lives in a tragicomic mirror: Novelist Sayed Kashua is trampling every barrier, as 'The Palestinian Israeli novelist writes in Hebrew and scripts...
View ArticleThere Once Lived a Girl who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged...
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of a career-spanning collection of Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Girl who Seduced Her Sister's...
View ArticleRuth Rendell profile
In the Independent on Sunday Andrew Wilson finds an Open and shut case: Is Ruth Rendell finally ready to open up about her puzzling personal life ?
View ArticleLast Friends review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jane Gardam's Last Friends, out soon from Europa editions (in the US) and Little, Brown (in the UK). A new Gardam novel is...
View ArticleMühlheimer Dramatikerpreis finalists
They've announced the finalists for the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis -- perhaps the leading German drama prize -- and four-time winner Elfried Jelinek is in the running yet again, for her FaustIn...
View Article'Literary' agents in ... India
In the Times of India Atul Sethi brings the terrible news that Literary agents gaining ground in India, as apparently: For many debutante authors, getting an agent is now becoming almost de...
View ArticleLiterature from ... Indonesia
In The Jakarta Globe C.W. Watson writes about Unlocking Indonesia Through An Exploration of Its Literature -- noting, among other things, that: Perhaps the best place to start, however, is the...
View ArticleMagris on Blindly
The Spring issue of The Threepenny Review is now available -- though very litle of it is accessible online, meaning you have to check out the print edition for pieces like Margaret Jull Costa...
View ArticleThe End of the World in Breslau review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Marek Krajewski's The End of the World in Breslau, now out in a US edition from Melville House.
View ArticleDavid Mitchell Q & A
Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is interviewed by Conor Dillon at DeutscheWelle, in 'Cloud Atlas' author talks revenge and opera. The opera in question is the Michel van der Aa work,...
View ArticleBookselling in ... the UK
The Bookseller prints the speech Philip Jones recently gave at the Independent Publishers Guild conference, offering a solid: "overview of bookselling across all sectors", What might be lost....
View ArticleThe Address Book review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Sophie Calle's notorious The Address Book, now out in English from Siglio.
View ArticleWomen's Prize for Fiction longlist
They've announced the longlist for the Orange Women's Prize for Fiction. I've seen two, read one (I did not like it), and reviewed none of these.
View Article