“The Gentle Spirit” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky is one of my favourite writers. I discovered him in my teenage years, read as many of his books as I could get my hands on, and…
Monday morning inspiration
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” – William…
American vs. British readers
Some interesting analysis of US and UK reading habits, courtesy of the summer edition of The Author magazine: American readers prefer romance;…
“The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon
There are three separate stories in this book: one is the killing of Russian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago Chief…
Monday morning inspiration
“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them.…
“Thoughts” by Giacomo Leopardi
The book was unfinished in Leopardi's lifetime, and perhaps the finished version would have been brilliant. This sequence of half-formed thoughts and bon mots, however, was just a…
Back in a week or two…
Summer is a fleeting thing in England. You have to grasp it before it gets away from you and the long, dark winter…
Monday Morning Inspiration
“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads…
And the winner is…
After much reading and re-reading and writing of lists, I awarded the London Fringe Short Fiction Award to Alex Burger for his…