The latest addition to my website is Rafael Chirbes‘ Crematorio [The Crematorium]. Like La larga marcha [The Long March] and La caída de Madrid [The Fall of Madrid], this one is a portrait of Spain, this time set in the 1990s/early 2000s and shows the complete and utter corruption of the construction boom, as the … Read more
The latest additions to my website are two Anne Enright novels. The first is What Are You Like?, an earlier novel. Frankly, this story of two young women looking for their origins did not really work for me. I found that, while Enright’s writing is, as always, superb, the plotting was somewhat unstructured and wooly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shalom Auslander‘s Hope: A Tragedy, one of the funniest books I have read in a long while. It is very politically incorrect, featuring a still alive but smelly and cantankerous Anne Frank, struggling to write a novel, a Jewish man whose fatal flaw is hope, his mother who … Read more
I have just returned from two weeks in Burma, where I saw the biggest book in the world (see photo at left). Other sites of literary interest included the Nationa Museum where they had samples of the handwriting of many Burmese writers, including Ma Ma Lay. I only have one Burmese book on my site … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergio de la Pava‘s A Naked Singularity. This made some best-off lists for the end of last year but not enough. The fact that it was self-published in 2008, is nearly 700 pages long and written by a US author of Colombian origin with an Italian name may … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Land. It is another novel set against the background of Irish history, in this case the disputes between landlords and tenants in the late nineteenth century, which gave rise to the formation of the Land League. It tells the story of the local Fenian group in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rodney Graham‘s The System of Landor’s Cottage. Rodney Graham is a Canadian artist who has experimented with manipulating found texts. He has taken existing works, such as Dr. No or Freud’s work on dreams, and added to them. In this case, he has written an entire novel from … Read more
Loukis Akritas‘s Νέος με καλάς συστάσεις (Young Man Seeks Position: Good References) is the latest addition to my website and the second Cypriot novel. Both of the Cypriot novels are autobiographical novels. This one is about a young man who leaves Cyprus for Athens in the 1930s but is unable to find any work and … Read more
Philip Hensher writes in the Independent of Granta’s list of best young novelists . I was aware of this forthcoming list – Granta had already flagged it – but this is a good opportunity to look at the proposed list and past lists. Hensher himself made the 2003 list, something he (modestly but deservedly) mentions … Read more
The latest additions to my website are a novel from Moldova, a first on my site, and a novel from the United Arab Emirates, the second on my site from that country. The first is Ion Druță‘s