Book reviews, new books, publishing news, book giveaways, and author interviews

Event Summary: Carlos Ruiz Zafon in conversation at the Wheeler Centre

Event Summary: Carlos Ruiz Zafon in conversation at the Wheeler Centre

If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!     On Monday I popped along to the Wheeler Centre to see Barcelona-born, LA-based author Carlos Ruiz Zafon in conversation with local writer and broadcaster Sian Prior. As usual, I went bearing pen and...

Hipsters, irony and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Hipsters, irony and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

If [the myth of Sisyphus] is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he grapples with whetherand if so, howits possible to exist in a life that is without meaning. However, its in...

On Sisyphus, Camus, knowledge and Chaim Potoks In The Beginning

On Sisyphus, Camus, knowledge and Chaim Potok's In The Beginning

Of late it seems that I am being haunted by intertextuality. Each book that I pick up seems to slot into the vast Connect Four board of hermeneutics that is my reading life, and with everything I read, I find my to-read list growing ever broader and ever deeper. I seem to be at a stage in my reading where so many unknown unknowns are swiftly becoming known...

Separating the author and the work: on Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita

Separating the author and the work: on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

Over the course of my last few reviews Ive been considering the role of the author as narrator and as character, and the degree to which authorial insertion is, to the mind of the reader, assumed to be inalienable. In large part this has been inspired by the narrator characterwho is, perhaps, the author himselfin Milan Kunderas'The...

Writers, writing and Dodie Smiths I Capture the Castle

Writers, writing and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle

  When reading PG Wodehouses'Love Among the Chickens'recently'I was struck by the narrators curiosity regarding to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs. These words resonated with me as they were the third time in as many books that Id come across a similar sentiment; the other books...

Thoughts on Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse

Thoughts on Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse

Love Among the Chickens is my first foray into the work of Wodehouse; and as a fairly early work, its one of Wodehouses first forays into Wodehouse as well. A deliciously written farcical novel, it brings together the seemingly dissimilar worlds of writing and chicken farming'which prove to have a lot more in common than one might first imagine,...