RIP Pick More Daisies
My favourite cafe in Crouch End, the cafe where I wrote most of my novel On the Holloway Road, has just put up a notice saying it has…
New short story published
My short story Safety was recently published in Carillon Magazine. A woman tries to keep herself safe from life by never leaving…
Consume less, live more!
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OPFl2Kxhs&hl=en&fs=1] From Friends of the Earth, https://www.foei.org/en/get-involved/livemore. Seen originally as a cartoon in New Internationalist, August 2008
Books not to miss in 2009
I’m never sure how these lists get created. In any case, the Guardian has named it’s books not to miss in 2009. Odd…
“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost…
"Three Stories" by Alan Bennett
All three of these stories have a deeply satirical flavour, with dry, mostly successful humour and pointed observations on the various absurdities and hypocrisies we live by. “The…
Interesting thought
The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. When the projected light is switched off all that…
Hakamada Iwao
In Japan, a prisoner on death row wakes up every morning not knowing if he will be executed that day. The prisoner…
Franco Moretti on the Novel
Read a very interesting piece by Franco Moretti in New Left Review, July/August 2008. It seems like a synopsis of a much…