About Brit Lit Blogs

Brit Lit Blogs is the brainchild of six British literary bloggers. Each working hard at bringing readers to forgotten or overlooked books, our BritLitBloggers decided that combining their latest blog entries together in one place would highlight the breadth and depth of British literary blogging.

Blogging about books has not been happening for very long, but already, in the US, the blogosphere has caught the attention of publishers and, more importantly, writers and readers.

Free to talk about their own unique literary passions, British literary bloggers have enthused over all sorts of books and many different authors. They have written about poetry and poets, theory and form, biography and prose. And they have done so, each in their own style, in blogs as varied as they are.

The UK media, and UK publishers, seem not to have noticed this quiet, bookish revolution. Perhaps BritLitBlogs will help them take note? More importantly, we hope it will allow other bibliophiles to find signposts to many new literary paths.

ReadySteadyBook

ReadySteadyBook is dedicated to reviewing the very best books - new and old: literary titles; political, historical and philosophical volumes; and the odd graphic novel.

Author pages dedicated to the likes of Benjamin, Bernhard, Celan, Josipovici and Sebald show our passions. Mark Thwaite's Editor's blog has been called "semi-Blanchodian" (!) and (by the Guardian) "a home-grown treasure". We've interviewed some of the best writers writing today. And the occasional music review adds very nicely to the mix ...

Asylum

John Self’s Shelves

Buzzwords: 3:AM Magazine

Buzzwords -- one of the oldest litblogs in the world -- was launched in April 2000 as 3:AM Magazine's news column. It enabled me to cover authors and artists who, at the time, were still out of our league.

More importantly, Buzzwords was a means of putting our content in a wider cultural context: music (the kind of music I associated with the type of fiction we championed) thus featured as prominently as literary news.

This Space

Apart from the usual chat and comment about the literary scene, this blog aims to draw attention to the peculiar experience of reading and writing, an experience which is solitary, apparently unique and frequently ignored. The title comes from Maurice Blanchot's essay "What is the Purpose of Criticism?":

"Critical discourse is this space of resonance within which the unspoken, indefinite reality of the work is momentarily transformed and circumscribed into words. And as such, due to the fact that it claims modestly and obstinately to be nothing, criticism ceases being distinguished from the creative discourse of which it would be the necessary actualization or, metaphorically speaking, the epiphany."
(Translated by Stuart and Michelle Kendall)

Stephen Mitchelmore lives in Brighton.

Eve's Alexandria

We are five women, radiant in the blush of youth and bibliophiles all. Having met at university we're now scattered throughout the UK, with an outpost in Prague.

Our interests are oh-so-various, but it all begins and ends with books. As to our areas of expertise? Medieval and Islamic history, museum ethnography and anthropology, geoscience and English literature.

dovegreyreader scribbles

A Devonshire based bookaholic,sock-knitting quilter who happens to be a community nurse in her spare time.