I have just returned from the one continent that has no native born writers (though it does have a few native born people). It also has one bookshop, as the Port Lockroy bookshop in the British Post Office sells a few books. I am, of course referring to Antarctica. However, en route we stopped in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alek Popov‘s Мисия Лондон (Mission to London). Alek Popov was the cultural attaché to the Bulgarian Embassy in London and this is a very funny novel, satirising the Embassy and its relations with the British. The main focus of the story is a charity event, hosted by the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Giono:‘s Un de Baumugnes (Lovers are Never Losers). This is the second in Giono’s Pan trilogy of novels. This one is a love story. Amédeé, an older itinerant farm worker meets Albin, a young man from the eponymous Baumugnes, a strange (and fictitious) community of non-Catholics driven … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alfredo Bryce Echenique‘s Las obras infames de Pancho Marambio [The Infamous Works of Pancho Marambio]. Bienvenido Salvador Buenaventura is a fifty-four year old successful lawyer in Lima. He has never been married. His parents and two brother are both dead, the men from alcoholism. The two others were … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jaroslav Kalfar‘s Spacemen of Bohemia. Kalfar was born in Prague but moved to the US when he was fifteen and wrote this novel in English. It is about Jakub Procházka, the first Czech astronaut (in 2018), who is sent into space to investigate a mysterious purple cloud between … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Robert Coover‘s Huck Out West. This is another wonderfully post-modern, iconoclastic, very funny book from Robert Coover. It tells the story of Huckleberry Finn and, to a certain degree, of Tom Sawyer, when they become adults and head out to the Wild West. Finn remains the loveable but … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Aminata Sow Fall‘s La Grève des bàttu (The Beggars’ Strike). This is a mocking satire on officialdom in Senegal (though neither the country nor the city where it takes place are named). The city, presumably, Dakar, is overrun with beggars and the public health department is given the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michel Miniussi‘s Lei Passatemps [The Pastimes]. Though born in Paris, Miniussi grew up in Cannes and became a very great supporter of Occitan literature. Sadly, he died at the age of thirty-six. This book, like some of his others, was published posthumously. It is an unusual book for … Read more
For EU countries, the United States and many other countries, copyright on published works is normally in existence till seventy years after the death of the author. Some countries have different copyright rules, as this article shows. Interestingly enough, France has a Mort pour la France category. What this means is that for members of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sarah Hall‘s The Wolf Border. This is another superb novel from Sarah Hall and it is, of course, about wolves. Rachel Caine works with wolves on the Nez Perce reservation. She is around forty and single, though she has had many a casual affairs, just as her mother … Read more