BritLitBlogs

I'm understandably very busy with stuff over at The Book Depository (do you like the new look? do you!?) but, if I get a second, tomorrow I'll post an article (by my pal Sophie from the Dalkey Archive Press) about the intriguing Stefan Themerson.... read more

Ooh look: a Sebald blog!
Thanks to Michael, from the fab Boydell & Brewer, for bringing this to my attention. And this is probably a good time to bring to your attention, dear readers, the fact that Boydell will be publishing Deane Blackler's Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience any day now:
W.G. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany. He found his way as a young academic to England and a career as professor of German. Only between the late 1980s and his untimely death in 2001 did he concentrate on nonacademic writing, crafting a new kind... read more

The Book Depository website has a fab new look and feel -- go see!... read more

Great debate over at Languagehat on how best to translate tu and vous:
In Orlanda, by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, one of the characters suddenly switches from the formal “vous” to the informal “tu.” This is a crucial moment in the narrative. The speaker is a prissy, bourgeois woman of thirty-five. She is addressing a young man with whom she entertains a somewhat ambiguous relationship. For the Francophone reader, this unwitting switch from “vous” to “tu” signals an important shift in the woman’s feelings. The problem for the translator is how to convey this to the English-speaking reader ... ... read more

I've just reviewed Kressmann Taylor's 1938 classic Address Unknown over on The Book Depository:
Address Unknown is a highly moving and deeply troubling epistolary novella. It is an account of a friendship warped and destroyed in the years of Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. Martin Schulse has returned to Germany to pursue his business interests as an art dealer, his close (Jewish) friend, Max Eisenstein, remains in San Francisco running the Shulse-Eisenstein Gallery from the Californian end. After a couple of warm letters expressing their deep affection for one another, Max asks Martin to comment on the... read more

The Mole -- Official Blog of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society: tunnelling, mining and undermining since 2007.... read more

Two very different reactions to the weekend review papers this week. On Saturday’s Guardian, a moving look by Caryl Phillips at the history of the song “Strange Fruit”,  immortalised by Bille Holliday, and written by Abel Meeropol, heroic figures both. As well as being a good overview, it’s also rather nice to hear Phillips’ appropriate humility in her earlier use of the title. Elsewhere in the paper, an interesting if contentious piece on Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart too. But then in today’s Observer, dear oh drear….this remarkably pompous and tedious piece of advertising   for a new book by Andrew Anthony. This article, slightly reworded, has been written by many other authors, most... read more

This isn’t even published yet, but I’m already looking forward to reading it. Omega Minor is Paul Verhaegen’s second novel, translated from the Dutch. Publishers Dalkey Archive Press are putting a lot of effort behind promoting it, and certainly it’s not a book that wants for ambition. I like novels that take on epic themes - provided they can actually deliver, like Richard Powers’ Plowing The Dark. This is the blurb on Dalkey’s site about Omega Minor: Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam... read more

“Tony Defries, the legendary rock manager who launched David Bowie and whose groundbreaking innovations form the bedrock of modern media presentation, is breaking a career-long silence to publish his long-awaited autobiography, Gods And Gangsters. A key figure behind some of the most crucial events and developments in contemporary music history, Defries was present at the birth of Madonna, the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder, the death of the Beatles and the ignition of Iggy. But he has never been interviewed, never made public declarations, never opened up and revealed his innermost truths. Told now for the very first time, Gods And Gangsters is... read more

Let’s continue as we mean to go on. Ben Myers describes spending the night with Marilyn Manson and how it provided a wealth of inspiration for his first novel The Book Of Fuck. Warren Ellis does a pithy summary of why Philip K. Dick being a speed addicted paranoiac really did let him see the future and made him “the greatest visionary writer of the 20th century”. ... read more

It was only just over 2 years ago that Craig Johnson did his epic Spike interview with Tony Wilson on the rebirth of Factory Records as F4. Now Mr Wilson is dead after a short and too brief battle with kidney cancer. Gutted. 57 was way too early for him to go.... read more

Recent articles added to Spike are Dan Coxon’s review of the new novel Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff, and my own look at the great anti-phrase-book English As She Is Spoke. Mine is rather silly really, but what can we do?... read more

The New York Declaration 2007 Joint Statement by the Chief Philosopher and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS) on Inauthenticity The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St., 25th September 2007, 6.30 p.m. (admission $5, free to Drawing Centre members) INS General Secretary and author of REMAINDER (Vintage Books 2007) Tom McCarthy and INS Chief Philosopher and author of INFINITELY DEMANDING (Verso 2007) Simon Critchley will present a statement on the subject of Inauthenticity – in art, literature, philosophy, economics and politics – advancing it as a central tenet in INS doctrine. Questions from the press and public will... read more

Forget the Booker contenders, David Lalé is definitely the one to watch. After signing Tom McCarthy, whose new novel Men in Space is launched on 5 September, Alma Books have come up trumps again with Last Stop Salina Cruz. No superlatives are strong enough to describe Lalé’s mesmerizing debut. The picaresque plot is compelling: a young protagonist retraces Arthur Cravan’s draft-dodging peregrinations which took him, during the First World War, from bohemian Paris to Mexico via Barcelona and New York. Elusive to the point of illusiveness, Oscar Wilde’s Dadaist poet-pugilist conman of a nephew is perfect fiction fodder and the... read more

the idiocy of idears, a FREE BOOK with NO AUTHOR, NO ISBN and NO BARCODE, is now available from bookshops in Central London. Copies have been ’secreted’ in the fiction, poetry, art, philosophy and travel sections of: Waterstones, Piccadilly
Hatchards, Piccadilly
Blackwells, Charing Cross Road
Borders, Charing Cross Road
Foyles, Charing Cross Road
Waterstones, Oxford Street
Borders, Oxford Street ... read more

The legendary Marc Zermati, who organised the 76-77 Mont de Marsan punk festivals and founded Skydog Records, is bringing an exhibition by the Musulmans Fumants to London. London Steamin’ will run from 4-29 September at Subway Gallery, located in a pedestrian subway below the Edgware Rd/Harrow Rd crossing. The Musulmans Fumants were a prominent group of French modern artists in the 80s which included Tristam Nada (work pictured), former lead singer with Parisian punk combo Guilty Razors. ... read more

Anything But Hackneyed and 3:AM Magazine presents In conjunction with Hackney Write to Ignite festival Tom McCarthy (pictured)
Matthew De Abaitua
Russell Celyn Jones 27 September 2007
From 6.30pm
Free The Broadway Bookshop, 6 Broadway Market, London E8 4QJ ... read more

You can now read 3:AM’s The Edgier Waters anthology online in one place in newly formatted versions of the articles. The only thing missing is the cover blurbs (DBC Pierre and Richard Hell, as you ask). From Billy Childish and Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo to the subversive ‘punk’ fiction of B.S. Johnson and the “dick-chasing literature” of Burroughs and hustler-poets, it’s all in there (contributor Susannah Breslin pictured). ... read more

Today, Descartes would probably be a novelist; Pascal certainly. A genre becomes universal when it seduces minds which have no reason to embrace it. But, ironically, it is just such minds that are sapping the novel from within: they introduce problems heterogeneous to its nature, diversify it, pervert and overburden it until they make its architecture crack. If the future of the novel is not close to your heart, it should please you to see a philosopher writing one. Whenever philosophers insinuate themselves into Letters, it is to exploit their confusion or to precipitate their collapse. EM Cioran in The... read more

In this weekend's NY Times, Neil Gordon says he lost faith in the work of Peter Handke from the point his career at which mine was discovered (albeit retrospectively as I began in the late 1980s). From Slow Homecoming onward, his novels illuminated a world darkened by the ordnance of a wrongheaded war against cliché. The earlier works seemed dated in comparison.

Gordon complains that since then "his exacting gaze, with its strange combination of compassion and accusation, turned on and began to consume itself." Yet the only evidence he supplies for this is a negative review of... read more

"I think it is possible that talent has moved to other things" he says, "and that real writing is occurring elsewhere, rather than in novels. You have to be very clear about the material that possesses you, and you've got to find the correct form for it. You can't borrow somebody else's form, otherwise you can easily end up with absurdities like, shall we say, the story of a New Guinea chieftain cast in the form of a George Eliot narrative. One narrative goes with a particular kind of life, a particular moment in history; another narrative comes at another... read more

One reason I haven't posted very often this Summer is ownership of a new bike. For an hour each evening I pedal Pither-like the same scenic route uphill, inland and back along the seafront. But I don't escape literature. Not only do I listen along to podcasts from Santa Monica and Stanford, but at the furthest reach I pass the home of Rudyard Kipling (brother of the famous Ronnie Kipling) and then, nearer home, the abode of Terence Rattigan. No sign of Clodagh Rodgers yet.... read more

In Sign & Sight's daily email I was drawn to a summary of what's in the news today: "Author Ilija Trojanow gets his creative writing students off ego-lit and into the world of the foreign". This sounded interesting enough to visit the "feuilletons" page (why does that word annoy me?) for further reading. I wasn't expecting what I got: Jean-Michel Berg, a student at the Free University of Berlin, tells of his experiences in the seminar given by writer Ilija Trojanow. [..] 'I can't imagine anything more boring than one's own sensations,' Trojanow says, thus staking out the ground between... read more

Storytelling, there is nothing more worldly than you, nothing more just, my holy of holies. Storytelling, patron saint of long-range combat, my lady. Storytelling, most spacious of all vehicles, heavenly chariot. Eye of my story, reflect me, for you alone know me and appreciate me. Blue of heaven, descend into the plain, thanks to my storytelling. Storytelling, music of sympathy, forgive us, forgive and dedicate us. Story, give the letters another shake, blow through the word sequences, order yourself into script, and give us, through your particular pattern, our common pattern. Story, repeat, that is, renew, postpone, again and again,... read more

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.  If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?  If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.  All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.  Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and... read more

Walden is a very involving book, full of detail and interest, but not one that I find it easy to blog; partly because I am quite sure that Thoreau would not approve of being blogged about.  I imagine him standing over my shoulder and looking pained (see left) as I type, not to mention sneering at the furniture ("Furniture!  Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse" I hear him mutter). I am therefore intrigued by an aside in the book's introduction:"The unabashed announcement on the first page of Walden that Thoreau... read more

So, we're home from an idyllic holiday touring Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire (with a detour to Niagara) to find that in the three weeks of our absence the builders have achieved little save the production of dust on an industrial scale.  We spent our third week in a rented house on a lake in New Hampshire and I cursed myself for deciding not to take Walden to re-read.  Now we're home I've plunged straight into it and it is already full of forgotten delights.  I particularly wish I could follow Thoreau's approach to dusting:"I had three pieces of limestone... read more

Yes, a deliciously long blog holiday!  Sadly, I've been so busy I haven't had a minute to think which book(s) I'm taking and will have to abandon the habit of a lifetime and just grab something for the plane and then pray that we encounter a bookshop (or ten) on our travels.  Have a nice July! ... read more

Oh, I wish I was the author of that line!  But it comes from The Sharp Side review of  On Chesil Beach.  A book I found repellent and cold in its emotional voyeurism and plodding in style.  ... read more

Remainder by Tom McCarthy was wonderful; but wonderful in such an oddly personal way that I fear saying anything too specific about it for fear of giving away some amazing personality defect that I'm happily not noticing.  All I can say is that you really should read it.  It will fascinate and unsettle, and what's more enjoyable than that in a novel? This article in the New York Review of Books (via) by Joyce Carol Oates on amnesiac novels (Remainder included, and for the record I did not find it either slow moving or aimless as her Joyceness seems to have... read more

As you can see the complex molecular structure of Listeria Bibliophilogenes is mutating slowly, just a couple of books proving tricky to replicate. (Consolation where art thou?) The reading is constantly in progress and I'm pacing myself because  I want to enjoy all these books as much as I enjoy every other one I read.
Currently I have Animal's People by Indra Sinha well underway and having quickly settled into the style of writing and the language I am welded to it. I feel sure I will be saying good shortlisty things about this one.
I read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan as slowly as I possibly could... read more

Two dgr Bookerthon updates on the blog today, expect the next at about 10 am.
Caught short by the longlist?
Eye-catching headline in the Telegraph this weekend who I read elsewhere owned up to being caught with their jackets off over this year's list. To make amends they have done a quick round up of their own and published brief reviews of six of the seven books they hadn't yet featured and a slightly longer one that was probably in the pipeline.
Interestingly four of them were ones that we in the land of the book blog had already... read more

As well as Booker longlisters wending their way to Devon, a vast array of other reading material has arrived this week.
The Cobbler of Normandy by Otto A.Berliner arrived from the US, WWII allied intelligence, Resistance and a cobbler.This has the makings of a great story and I'm praying it will be because the premise has promise, if you see what I mean.
The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis.Billy Connolly loves this one and Jake Chapman laughed and laughed, mean cruel and refreshingly cynical.Great.
Sea Stories an anthology of short stories being published to mark the 70th anniversary of... read more

Having been to the Gulf of Mexico, albeit very briefly just a few weeks ago, suddenly I've developed an interest in hurricanes when, apart from the big ones, I barely used to notice them before.They tend not to be a problem here in Devon UK.
Thanks to Susan Hill for this link to www.accuweather.com and Hurricane Dean updates.
I'm thinking about Jamaica and all those homes, just a few planks nailed together and a tarpaulin over the top, built and probably rebuilt time and again. Balanced so precariously high up in the mountains, they will implode like matchsticks and I... read more

It's impossible to know quite how Bookhound's mind works when he's browsing in a junk shop, but add in the luxury of a long wheel base Land Rover and a trailer and the result can be very unpredictable.Bookcases of all size and shape are his speciality, possibly his addiction, but to be honest you can expect him to come home with just about anything from a stuffed elephant (false, not yet but give him time) cast iron brackets from old railway signal boxes (true, now holding up the verandah) to even stranger things such as old library card file cabinets.read more

Endsleigh Salon book evening this week and, having missed the last two, it was lovely to head back to heaven on earth and talk around this month's theme of books and America.
The themes are working supremely well and we all agreed at the end of the evening that we'd had a fantastic discussion about a great range of books when so often the debate about one and the same book read by all can often dry up worryingly fast. Then book groups can go way off topic and end up discussing who has got planning permission for that plot... read more