Borges Marathon, Part 14: The Lottery in Babylon
How do you explain the effects of random chance? Borges invented an all-powerful Lottery governing all possible events in life to help us think through it.
Borges Marathon, Part 9: Et Cetera
This section in A Universal History of Iniquity includes several interesting fragments, some of which could provide the basis for interesting stories but are not really developed.
Man on Pink Corner: Borges Marathon, Part 8
In this story, Jorge Luis Borges takes us into the colourful world of knife fights and gangsters on the streets of old Buenos Aires. It's a compelling portrait and a beautifully constructed story—with a powerful twist in the final few…
Borges Marathon, Part 7: Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv
One of the fun parts of working my way through the Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges is trying to understand where the boundary lies between fact and fiction. In Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv, as far as I can…
April 2021 Reading Roundup
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…
The Vastness of the Dark by Alistair MacLeod
The Vastness of the Dark seems to be a quite simple tale about a young man escaping from the confines of his family to find freedom, but it becomes something more complex in the last few pages.
Borges Marathon, Part 2: The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro
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…
Stories of Racism and Retail Hell: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Race and capitalism in America should be fertile ground for literary fiction. This year’s Black Friday shopping frenzy brought the usual bout of stabbings and shootings to add to the overall death count, not to mention the looming environmental collapse that…
Different kinds of writer
I have a bad habit, sometimes, of generalising about what “writers” are like, mostly based only on my own experience. Last night I got a good reminder that there are many different kinds of writer. I was performing at an…