Here’s a little life tip for you. If you ever feel that the time is starting to drag and you’d like your life to be busier, try signing up for a blogging event. As soon as the dates roll around, you’ll find your life getting so hectic that all your plans for diligent participation go out of the window. That’s… Read More
I had a short story published recently in Storgy magazine. It’s available to read free online, so do check it out if you’re interested. It’s about two women caught on opposite sides of a militarised border wall: one in Europe, one in Africa. They develop a tentative friendship that is soon put to the test by the harsher realities of… Read More
Before I read Borges, I used to think there was a sharp dividing line between fiction and nonfiction. In my own writing, there’s a huge gap between the serious, diligently factual articles I write for The Wall Street Journal and the entirely invented worlds of my novels and short stories. But Jorge Luis Borges is constantly blurring the lines and… Read More
I’m reading The Archipelago of Another Life by Andreï Makine in the company of Emma at Words and Peace and Carol at Cas d’Intérêt. The novel is set in the bewitching wilderness of the Siberian “taiga”, a huge expanse of lake-studded forest on the far eastern edge of the old Soviet Union. It’s structured around a pursuit: a small band… Read More
Spring is here: storks on the electricity poles, calves in the fields, and suddenly a million things to do around the house and garden. Full-time travel around the 50 countries of Europe was, in some ways, less consuming of time and energy than living in a small cottage in rural Serbia. In any case, after a cold, dark winter exacerbated… Read More
Alistair MacLeod was a Canadian writer who told stories about the rugged landscape of Cape Breton island in Nova Scotia and the rugged miners and fishermen who inhabited it. Marcie over at Buried in Print has embarked on a fascinating reading project covering all of his short stories over the next couple of years. I probably won’t be able to… Read More
I missed my monthly reading roundup in February, so here are two months together. As you’ll see, they were dominated by one huge book: Marcel Proust’s seven-volume, 3,000-page masterpiece. But I managed to squeeze in a few more good books as well. The Ants Will Come and Tell Me by Lena & Daniel Platt I enjoyed this chronicle of a… Read More
As the Empire was falling apart, Britain had a problem: how to keep control of all its former colonies and their resources as they became independent. Acting in good faith was, of course, out of the question. Many of the leaders pushing for independence were talking of using their resources for the benefit of their own people, which went against… Read More
I love the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. Back in the early days of this blog, I was so deeply affected by reading his collection of ‘fictions’ that I broke my optimistic vow of reviewing every book I read. It seemed impossible to review a book so vast and varied—it would be like trying to catalogue the contents of one… Read More