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Alejandro Zambra: Bonsai
I‘ve mentioned before how lovely Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series is and have been meaning for some time to read another. Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra felt like the timely...
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Etgar Keret: Kneller’s Happy Campers
The Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, is probably best known for writing short stories, a few collections of which have seen translation. Typically the stories are very short, no more than a few pages, and...
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A.L. Kennedy: What Becomes
A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary writers who, over the last twenty years, has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, and more. In...
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Roberto Bolaño: By Night In Chile
It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translations, The Savage Detectives and...
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Des Dillon: Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim
It’s called Scotland’s shame, the sectarianism that has attached itself to Scottish society and festers therein. The absorption of Ireland’s exiles in the nineteenth century saw Catholicism take steps...
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Philip Roth: The Breast
Having intended, at one time, to read the books of Philip Roth in order of publication, a brick wall was soon hit with second book, Letting Go, Roth’s first novel proper and still his largest to date....
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Alexander Pope: The Art Of Sinking In Poetry
Alexander Pope is considered one of England’s greatest poets of the eighteenth century, known for satirical poems as The Rape Of The Lock and the Dunciad. He was a member of the Scriblerus club, along...
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Robert Coover: Briar Rose
The American writer Robert Coover would appear to be a dot on the landscape of British literary consciousness – I don’t know how well known he is in the States – but a small number of his better known...
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On The Nobel Prize in Literature
With the impact of recognising Herta Müller as the 2009 Nobel laureate in literature slightly dampened by rising expectations that she would be the recipient I find myself still happy, like last year,...
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Walter Tevis: The Man Who Fell To Earth
Science fiction has been in the news a lot these days, most notably with Kim Stanley Robinson’s much publicised criticism about the lack of recognition awarded to the genre by judges of the Man Booker...
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David Vann: Legend Of A Suicide
In Ichthyology, the opening story of David Vann’s collection, Legend Of A Suicide (2008), there appears a fly that gets stuck in a fishtank and, in its panic, sends off a series of ripples that...
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Kressmann Taylor: Address Unknown
There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (“Fourteen years since the...
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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010
The longlist for the 2010 Independent Foreign Ficton Prize has been announced, and it’s quite a small press friendly affair. As usual, titles under consideration were those translated works (from a...
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Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö: Roseanna
“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real mystery: a woman’s naked body has been...
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David Markson: This Is Not A Novel
The tributes that followed the recent death of David Markson inspired me to pick up one of his novels, something I’d been hesitant about before. Cursory flicks in the book stores had shown that those...
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Dexter Palmer: Version Control
Technology in the early twenty-first century is changing our lives — the way we do tasks; how we interact with friends; how we meet potential partners. The rise of Big Data, assisted by our...
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Yuri Herrera: Kingdom Cons
While Yuri Herrera already has two novels rendered in English, his third to be translated, Kingdom Cons (2008, tr. Lisa Dillman, 2017) was actually his debut. A slim volume, like his others previously...
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Kerstin Ekman: The Dog
“Where does something begin?” is the opening line to Kerstin Ekman‘s The Dog (1986, tr. Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright, 2009), and it seems at first a silly question. Where else but the beginning?...
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Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones
Despite existing in some literary middle ground between short story collection and novel, Jim Crace’s debut, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His encore, The Gift of Stones...
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Peter Adolphsen: Machine
The passage of fifty-five millions years sounds extremely epic, but here, in Peter Adolphsen’s Machine (2006, tr. Charlotte Barslund, 2007) that passage in time is compressed into the less monumental...
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