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The Humans
MarkShermin: "Have people from your world been here before?"Starman: "Before. Yes, we are interested in your species."Mark Shermin: "You mean you're some kind of anthropologist? Is that what you're...
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Niches
I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit – Edmund...
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The Silence of Gethsemane
…ecce homo… – John 19:5 (Latin Vulgate)Basically there are three kinds of novels: novels where everything is made up (e.g. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), historical novels where the author aims to be as...
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Indian Nocturne
I do not know if I exist... it seems possible to me that I might be someone else's dream... I might be a character in a novel, moving through the long waves of someone else's literary style... —...
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Pnin
He is not a very nice person but he is fun – Nabokov describing the character of Pnin in a letter to his editor at The New YorkerReaders of my third novel, The More Things Change, which at the current...
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You say tomato, I say tomahto. You say stranger, I say outsider.
Beyond a certain point one cannot reconcile the demands of translation and of poetry, and one must opt for one or the other – A.C. Graham, introduction to Poems of the Late T’angA while ago I reviewed...
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Homogenised Tongues
“Look!” he said. “The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!” – Genesis 11:9 Looking aheadWhere will it all end?...
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Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
“Cry me a river,” Dennis said through his teeth.“Beg your pardon?”“Cry me a river, it’s an expression. Basically it means all you guys can go fuck yourselves.”“Oh. Well. That’s awfully sentimental of...
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The Flame Alphabet
The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of...
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The Poetry of Harold Pinter
Pinter’s not a poet, but he doesn’t know it. – Daniel Finkelstein, The Times, 16 March 2005In August 1950 two poems appeared in Poetry London 5—'New Year in the Midlands' and 'Chandeliers and...
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Silent Noon
You can’t go back to a place that no longer exists. – Trilby Kent, Silent NoonWhen I agreed to review this book I was labouring under the impression that it was a YA novel. The mistake was completely...
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The Last Banquet
We seek the immortality of fame around the same time our bodies begin to seek the sweet peace of oblivion. Such is the contradiction of being human. – Jonathan Grimwood, The Last BanquetI haven’t read...
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My Year of Meats
So what you’re basically saying is that the residues in meat from hormones, steroids, pesticides, bacterial and viral contaminants, will lead to cancers, infertility, brain fevers, and a host of other...
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A conversation with Brendan Gisby
Geography is people – William McIlvanney, ‘Growing Up in the West’Recently I was invited to join a growing group of Scottish writers over at McVoices. The man behind the initiative is one Brendan Gisby...
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The Care Home
HONESTY, SEX, GUILT, DRUGS, LOVE, PAIN. – Lee Carrick, The Care HomeFirst-time novelists face two problems. The first is what to write about. The second is how to write about it. I’m not sure which is...
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Lolito
I think that honesty is like a piñata with nothing inside. – Ben Brooks, LolitoLet’s cut to the chase. No one these days picks up a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 modernist novel Lolita ignorant of...
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Jock Tamson's Bairns
[L]abels are for tins not people – Cally Phillips, A Week With No LabelsLet me take a couple of paragraphs to ease you into this week’s article. I watch a lot of science fiction. New stuff or old I’m...
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Silence in the writings of Guillevic and Beckett
Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps. – Samuel BeckettI discovered the French poet Eugène Guillevic a...
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Let the Games Begin
There was no plan B. And plan A leaked water all over the place. – Niccolò Ammaniti,Let the Games BeginFor a very Italian novel—l'Unità said that “Let the Games Begin may well be the print version of...
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The Island of Whispers
For centuries … the rocky, whale-shaped islet was known to people on both sides of the Forth as Plague Island: a place to be avoided, a place of ghosts and demons and eerie, whispering winds. – Brendan...
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