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
The most recent additions to my website are two César Aira novels. I continue to be amazed by everything I read of his. Varamo (Varamo), which has been translated into English, is a novel about a low level Panamanian civil servant who goes home one evening and, though he has never written, indeed, never even … Read more
The latest review on my site is Rafael Chirbes‘ La caída de Madrid [The Fall of Madrid]. This follows on from his La larga marcha [The Long March] but this time telling the story of a group of Spaniards, who are all connected to each other, on 19 September 1975, hours before Franco dies. The … Read more
Continuing my reading of novels from countries from which i have never read a novel before, here are two from Laos. The first is Oubone-lat Papet‘s Au-delà du Mékong [Beyond the Mekong], an autobiographical novel by a half-French, half-Laotian woman. She has clearly struggled with her life. She is unsure of her sexuality, having relationships … Read more
After promising in both the first part and then second part of this topic, here is my mea culpa as to why I have so few women writers on my site. Many years ago, soon after it came out, I read Gail Godwin‘s A Mother and Two Daughters. The book, at least in the United … Read more