November Reading Roundup
After a busy few months of travel, we slowed down a bit in November and spent more time just staying in comfortable rural hotels in Bulgaria and northern Greece. That meant more time for work and writing, but also for…
German Literature Month: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
November is German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzy and Caroline! If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an annual celebration of literature in the German language. There’s a schedule of readalongs, but I’m too disorganised for that, so I’m going…
Review of Dodge and Burn by Seraphina Madsen
Imagine Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Hunter Thompson engaging in a wild, drug-fuelled orgy somewhere out in the Arizona desert, and by some mystical process conceiving a daughter who then turns around and gives them the finger, inverting their male-dominated…
Q&A with the founders of new indie publisher Dodo Ink
Dodo Ink is a new independent publisher in the UK, promising to publish “bold, daring, risky but accessible literary novels”. They’re currently running a crowdfunding campaign to fund their first three novels, with incentives ranging from free books to getting…
A potential novel: In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds
Reading Adam Foulds’s new novel In the Wolf’s Mouth, I was reminded of literary movements like Oulipo, which explored the concept of ‘potential literature’. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that the novel is particularly experimental. It’s the ‘potential’ aspect that…
Tyranny and liberation: Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast
There’s a reason why oppressive societies have images of their leader on every wall and statues in every town square. For the tyrant to maintain power, he must be everywhere, or at least give that appearance. In this gripping portrait…
The book launch
Thanks to everyone who came to my book launch on Wednesday night! It was a wonderful evening, by which I mean that lots of people turned up and I didn’t botch my speech or reading 🙂 For those of you…
The Quiddity of Will Self by Sam Mills
This book is unlike any other I’ve read. That, in itself, is a reason I’m glad I read it. In a world in which too many books are reminiscent of other books, this one is truly unique. It may sound…
The Twitterati: literary fiction writers to follow on Twitter
A blog post listing all the writers on Twitter would probably take me a lifetime to compile, and cause WordPress to explode in indignation as soon as I hit “Publish”. So I decided to cut it down a bit. The…