tmn The latest addition to my website is Beka Adamashvili‘s ამ რომანში ყველა კვდება (Everybody Dies in this Novel) . This is a wonderful postmodern romp by a young Georgian writer in which a fictional character called Memento Mori tries to save characters who get killed in literature (starting with Romeo and Juliet) and then teams … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Gray‘s Narrator. The narrator is called, yes, Mr (Basil) Narrator. He is in (a fictitious) Morocco working for a British engineering firm and trying to get a project fior a pump-house approved which had been on track but now is not. This seemingly requires getting to the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Month of the Drowned Dog. This is a decidedly postmodern novel, as we might expect from Sharp. Sharp, the author, tells of a character known only as the writer who had written a book which he had abandoned and is now returning to. We get (more … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mia Couto‘s Mulheres de Cinzas (Woman of the Ashes). This is the first book in a trilogy about Portugal’s colonisation of the part of Africa that came to be Mozambique, at the end of the nineteenth century. We follow a village, Nkokolani, inhabited by the Chopi people. They … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Титан (A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles). This is not a novel but, as Lebedev says in his introduction, the stories are based on his and others’ reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and share a mystical topography in which the legacy of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yao-Chang Chen‘s 傀儡花 (Puppet Flower). The novel is primarily set in Taiwan in 1867 when Taiwan is partially controlled by the the Qing Dynasty and partially by the indigenous tribes. Various foreign powers – Netherlands, Portugal, Britain and the US have been involved, though the US less so … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cheon Myeong-Kwan‘s 고래 (Whale). This is an incredibly complicated and, at times, improbable story about various characters during the second part of the 20th century. Geumbok escapes her brutal father, with the aid of an itinerant fishmonger who, thanks to Geumbok’s entrepreneurial skills, becomes rich but loses her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Clemens Meyer‘s Als wir träumten (While We Were Dreaming). This was the first of his novels published in German but the second to be published in English. It follows the lives of a group of boys/young men in the deprived areas of Leipzig, starting shortly before the fall … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Belén Gopegui‘s Quédate este día y esta noche conmigo ( Stay This Day And Night With Me). This is a novel about Google. We start with a Google intern receiving a non-standard job application. It is 50, 000 words, on paper, not submitted digitally and submitted by two … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maki Kashimada‘s 六〇〇〇度の愛 (Love at Six Thousand Degrees). This is something of a Japanese response to the film Hiroshima mon amour, scripted by Marguerite Duras, about a French woman who has an affair in Hiroshima with a Japanese man whose relatives were killed by the atom bomb. In … Read more