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New Simon Critchley book just out:
The remarkable resurgence of interest in religion has become one of
the defining issues of our time. Whether approached from a
“post-secular” perspective, or fanatically affirmed/denied by
fundamentalists of both religious and atheistic persuasions, we are
living in a moment where religion and a wider constellation of its
concerns have an inescapable hold over us. Simon Critchley's new book The Faith of the Faithless
attempts to philosophically re-frame the nature of the current debates
over the role of religion in the 21st century. In the book, out today,
Critchley proposes a new perspective... read more
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Literature Across Frontiers will be presenting the report Literary Translation from Arabic into English in the UK and Ireland at the Free Word Centre, in London, tonight (from 6.30pm).... read more
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Back in 2005 I interviewed Dai Vaughan. Neal Ascherson once called Dai ‘one of the most imperiously intelligent fiction-writers alive’, he could have added one of the most gracious and charming too...
Great news, then, that the excellent CB editions has just published Dai's latest book Sister of the artist:
A cloaked figure sweeps towards her. It has the features of Viktor, who she knows is far away. But they are only a painted oval held on a wand, which he flicks aside to reveal, under the sacking cowl, her own double; and she hears a voice – her own? –... read more
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Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours:
Wikipedians spend thousands of hours every week working
tirelessly in reviewing and removing infringing content. Wikipedia talk
pages show tremendous care about protecting copyright and sophisticated
study on the many nuances of what constitutes infringement as opposed to
legitimate speech. Wikipedia is based on a model of free licenses.
Every Wikipedian is a rights owner, licensing their work under free
licenses. Infringement harms our mission; free licenses do not work with
infringement. Wikipedia has a mission of sharing knowledge around the
world, and that is... read more
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Just commissioned this for work (at Quercus) and am very proud of it – so thought I'd share here!... read more
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Blog time is faster than real time. How else to explain that it’s approaching two years since I read and raved over Evan S. Connell’s novel Mrs Bridge? It feels like I just finished it. Back then, in the innocent days of April 2010, I asked “Classics imprints, where are you?” The answer was: here all along, because even then (quite independently of my plea) Penguin Modern Classics slowly and surely drew their plans to do the decent thing. Mrs Bridge, then, will be reissued in July 2012, with Mr Bridge to follow in 2013. I couldn’t wait until then... read more
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My ongoing issues with availability of time to read and review are so well-rehearsed here that I’ve begun to bore even myself. I mention them once again only to explain why I’ve decided to take a page from Trevor Berrett’s blog and review a short story. I’ve done this once or twice before, but only when the story was published as a standalone volume. There are compelling reasons to do this, I think, other than the necessity of time constraint. Many stories deserve consideration at full length and can serve as a window to an author’s work generally. The corollary... read more
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As the toad work squats on my life, and infant Self number two squats on my lap, shoulder, and every other free space, this blog has been updated less frequently in 2011 than before. I can’t promise better for the immediate future, but let’s distract ourselves in the meantime with a best-of-the-year selection which I think is as strong as any I’ve posted. One of the advantages of having less time to read and write is that I’m better at choosing which books are likely to delight me most. This list includes only titles I’ve reviewed, so apologetic nods go... read more
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Occasionally you read a novel which entirely subverts your expectations and, in doing so, becomes one of your favourites of the year. (I had better add, in case anyone suspects slippery phrasing, that this is that book.) I’m not sure what I thought Lazarus is Dead would be: not quite a ‘religious spoof’ as the Edinburgh Book Festival crassly categorised it. Perhaps a contemporary allegory? In fact, such category issues are central to the book.
Lazarus is Dead is described on the jacket as “genre-bending,” though blending might be more apt. It is a novel, a biography, and a study in... read more
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As a reader who’s been with Jeanette Winterson through thick and thin (and there was enough of the latter to make me wonder if the thick, viewed from a distance, was thin too), I was disappointed to hear that she was publishing a memoir. Didn’t she say “There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies”? That was the refrain from her 1994 novel Art & Lies, one of the thinnish moments I’m nonetheless very fond of (“my most closed piece of work … written at a time when I was looking inwards not outwards”). But there needn’t be... read more
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When I was younger, it used to drive me mad when friends (or, more often, family members) would knock music by artists I loved, saying: “All their songs sound the same.” What they meant, I thought, was that their songs don’t sound like anyone else. So it is with Magnus Mills: all his books sound the same, in a sense, because they don’t sound like anyone else.
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, therefore, is in a sense business as usual for Mills. It places us in the usual nonspecific but familiar setting, and gives us the... read more
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“Festival W.G. Sebald: Politique de la Mélancolie” will take place in Paris at Centre Pompidou from February 22 through MARCH 12. Participants include: Muriel Pic, Martine Carré, Jean-Christophe Baill, Martin Rueff, Ulrich von Bülow, and Jürgen Ritt. von Bülow will apparently speak about the Sebald archive at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. According to the website:
Valérie Mréjen launches an investigation into writer W.G. Sebald and his work. Following upon the “lecture-performance” and the “spoken painting” that previous editions of the Festival have introduced as new and viable genres of contemporary art, this forensic investigation calls upon the ghosts of the past to... read more
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There are images from Patricio Guzmán’s 1970s documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile that are still engraved within my brain after more than three decades. And I suspect that three decades from now I will still be able to recall images from his latest film Nostalgia for the Light (2010). In the intervening decades, Chile has entered a period of official forgetting, of “turning the page” on the massacres and disappearances of the Pinochet regime. So instead of being a documentary of politics and violence like The Battle of Chile, Nostalgia for the Light is a more restrained, steadfastly philosophical... read more
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Grant Gee’s excellent documentary on W.G. Sebald Patience (After Sebald) is starting to appear in cinemas across England. It will have a short run at the ICA in London from January 27 through February 2, with Gee appearing on the 27th. Details here.
If you are near Manchester you have a chance to see Patience and meet Grant Gee on January 29 at Cornerhouse. It’s just a single showing as part of a series put on by the New British Cinema Quarterly. Here is the link for more details. The website includes a very brief video clip that manages to... read more
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Continuing my prolonged reading of Saturn’s Moons, I turn to Luke Williams’ essay “A Watch on Each Wrist: Twelve Seminars with W.G. Sebald.” Williams piece deals equally with Sebald the teacher and Sebald the writer, since Williams studied for a Creative Writing MA under Sebald, and his essays adapts some of his class notes from Sebald’s final, unfinished seminar in the fall of 2001. Two themes stood out for me: Sebald’s arguments for a “documentary” approach to the novel and his brief, but tantalizing allusion to Werner Heisenberg.
But first, here’s the explanation for the title of Williams’ essay, taken from... read more
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After a brief hiatus I’ve picked up Saturn’s Moons again and I just read the three essays that focus on W.G. Sebald’s time as a professor at the University of East Anglia: Gordon Turner’s “At the University: W.G. Sebald in the Classroom,” Luke Williams’ “A Watch on Each Wrist: Twelve Seminars with W.G. Sebald,” and Florian Radvan’s “The Crystal Mountain of Memory: W.G. Sebald as a Classroom Teacher.” Here is one of the more intriguing excerpts from Turner’s essay, where he writes about Sebald’s general reticence to talk about his life as a writer to most of his colleagues and... read more
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Here is my annual listing of works of fiction and poetry published during the previous year which contain embedded photographs as part of the textual matter. You can see all of my previous lists here (I’ve recently made additions to the lists for 2006 and 2009). If you know of a book that I have overlooked, please let me know in a comment.
Alcalay, Ammiel. “neither wit nor gold” (from then). Brooklyn: Ugly Ducking Presse. Paperback original. Contain numerous photographs by the author.
Davis, Lydia. The Cows. Louisville: Sarabande. [Quarternote Chapbook #9]. Paperback original. The text contains 26 photographs of cows... read more
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"Dream is a second life." Nerval's Aurélia begins with these words and in an instant the reader is pulled into the reverie of the imagination even as the narrator pushes back by explaining his announcement. The first moments of sleep are the image of death: a hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts, and it is impossible for us to determine the precise instant when the I, in another form, resumes the creative work of existence. Little by little an obscure underground cavern grows lighter, and the pale, solemnly immobile figures that inhabit the realm of limbo emerge... read more
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As a child I didn't read books. At least, I have no memory of doing so. My teacher in primary school once read to us James & the Giant Peach, and I enjoyed that, so why didn't I rush straight to Roald Dahl's other books? I don't know. Still, it can't be true that I didn't read because, a few years ago browsing in a small shop dedicated to children's books, I found a display of Ladybird Books' Well Loved Tales, reprints of editions I recognised as part of my childhood. The moment I saw the cover of... read more
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Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder. The cover of volume two announces letters from 1941 to 1956, yet the first letter is dated 17th January, 1945. The missing years were those of war, most of... read more
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Poetry, ladies and gentleman: an expression of infinitude, an expression of vain death and of mere Nothing. These were the first words I read from The Meridian, a speech given by Paul Celan on October 22nd 1960 in the German city of Darmstadt on reception of the Georg-Büchner-Prize, as quoted by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock. The excess of specification is deliberate. On a provincial train twenty years ago I read the words in the dizziness of discovery and recognition. At that time it was fragment of a speech not readily available... read more
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The prospect of a planned, solitary walk can often become off-putting. At first the distance seems daunting, the landscape predictable and the destination uninspiring, so, sitting down, one thinks: what's the point? Better to stay indoors and do something productive, like, say, read a book. But then reading too seems like too much intellectual effort and one has to get out. For a while I let Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking wait because it looked like a solemn work of study; 264 pages on a mundane subject. Moreover, Lost and Art threaten a New Agey cris de... read more
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In his essay On Reading, Proust says great writers prefer old writing, the works of the ancients, and finds two reasons: first, that they are “more easily diverted by different ideas” and second, that they recognise “the beauty which the mind that created them was able to put into them.” Both standard observations of course. But, as is Proust’s habit, he doesn’t stop there: “They receive another beauty, more affecting still, from the fact of that their substance, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror of life.” He compares the experience to walking... read more
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Time for two more of my reviews that originally appeared in SFX magazine: The Emperor's Knife by Mazarkis Williams is available over at the magazine's website; here on Alexandria is Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder.
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Ah, that old tale: Boy meets girl, girl hates boy on sight, boy returns the favour, boy rescues girl from certain death, boy lies on top of girl in the forest for several hours (essential for hiding from pursuers, of course), girl and boy are forced to travel together and bicker like crazy at every step. What happens next, readers?
If you said, “Girl and... read more
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This is where the resolution starts to hurt, with the new book lists. I somehow managed to avoid nearly all of the Most Anticipated Books of 2012 posts and articles around New Year, but it was only so long before I clickety-clicked my way to temptation. It came this week, in the unexpected form of the Waterstones 11 - the bookshop chain's picks for the hotly anticipated debuts of the year. The list doesn't hold many suprises, and is determinedly white, anglo-centric and dominated by contemporary realism (although, lots of women writers - hurrah!). But it doesn't take much to... read more
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Greenvoe is George Mackay Brown's first novel, published in 1972. He was not a young man by then, nearly 51 years old, with long years of study, illness and seclusion on his beloved Orkney already behind him. He had published some poetry and some short stories, but was only just beginning to build a quiet acclaim amongst other writers. It would be another 20 years until he wrote Vinland (which I read and loved last year); he would be over 70 when he was finally nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994. I don't know how this first novel was... read more
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This week's reading was dominated by How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall, which I revisited for my museum bookgroup. I originally read and reviewed it back in early 2010 so I won't witter on too much, only to say that the book lived up to my expectations on returning to it. It was just as gorgeous, provocative and lively the second time around. The response from the group was very positive too, with just one or two clashes with Hall's prose style (overblown, one reader thought) and the lack of a 'point' to the plot (too... read more
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Nicholas Nickleby is an odd hybrid beast. On the one hand it is all fun and mockery, with caricatures enough to people three such novels; on the other hand it is full of a barely digested rage against injustice, poverty and greed. Even I, who has read so little Dickens, can see that it is rag-tag mish-mash of half-formed ideas, characters, feelings that will reappear in later fictions. Here is a proto-Scrooge in the form of grasping moneylender Ralph Nickleby; and surely there is a little bit of Nicholas Nickleby in David Copperfield; and something of the Cheerybles in the... read more
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I'm now 7 days into my TBR resolution of 2012, and it has been harder than expected. Since determining not to read books acquired after 1/1/2012, and therefore to limit my acquisition of them, I've learnt several lessons.
First, that a significant amount of my time is spent lusting after books: when I'm reading blogs, when I'm flicking through review magazines, when I'm browsing the shelves at work. I can usually satiate this with a spot of judicious borrowing or purchasing. No longer and I'm having to get used to doing these things without clicking 'add to basket' or reaching... read more
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You might recall that I have been searching for the perfect reading chair for years and to no avail.
It needed to be comfortable and low, easy to move up near the fire in the Bookroom when the wind is whistling, nice enough colour, so a deep red or blue or green would be fine, nothing complicated in that.
The best I could do was covet the one at Charleston until the chair with my name on it made itself known to us in that case. So last Saturday morning Bookhound started the day with...
'Have we got any plans for today...'
I did... read more
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As a delightful and very generous addition to today's wonderful post from Amanda Craig, Amanda has very kindly offered two signed boxed sets (twelve CDs in each) of the unabridged audio version of Hearts and Minds read by Sian Thomas. They are here safely stowed chez dovegrey and my apologies, but because of postage costs, we will have to limit this to UK entries only.
Amanda has suggested that it would be nice to know that, after listening, the winners might be able to pass these on to someone who was perhaps dyslexic, or partially sighted, or to a local 'talking... read more
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Please extend a very warm welcome to Dickens and I... for Amanda Craig, writer and journalist and great encourager of all things dovegreyreader. Amanda's most recent novel, the hugely successful Hearts and Minds is currently optioned for development as a TV series and for the novel's all-seeing eye over 21st century London, it is surely covering territory that Mr Dickens would find very intriguing were he to walk back into our lives today. Another of Amanda's novels, A Private Place has just been re-published in Kindle format, and with its themes of life at a boarding school I think our... read more
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Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive...'
Thank you to Walter Scott, Marmion Canto vi, for the now rather hackneyed yet perfect quote ( and don't worry, I didn't know either and had to look it up) to describe White Crosses by Larry Watson.
So about a week to go before Christmas, all my festive reading sorted, trees to decorate and hand-made presents still to be finished and I am idly wandering around the blogs for a catch-up, when I head to Canada where Kevin has written about White Crosses.
Now I have no plans to head... read more
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I've had this book for years, The Modern Library - The 200 best novels in English since 1950 compiled by Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin, and published by Picador in 1999, countless 1p copies available though I see there is a newer version published last year and now Kindle-ified.
There's nothing like a good reading list, and whilst of course we might all compile different ones, and lists like this can't help but be subjective, I love them and have always liked this book for the variety it offers. Carmen Callil, founding editor of Virago and Irish author Colm Toibin make... read more
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'The fin has come a little early this siecle...'
Angela Carter talking about her own life and impending death and I have her on my list of women writers to zone in on through 2012.
After tackling some of the Big Scary Male Authors last year, and all a bit half-heartedly, I have filled my chair-side cabinet with books by women writers I would really like to read more of this year. Gathering them all in one place and keeping them in my eyeline works for me and I have had a lovely time pondering who to include. Tucked away in... read more
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