Ana María del Río: Carmen’s Rust
It’s thanks to a slurry of comments on Chilean literature in my review of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, that I come to Ana María del Río’s Carmen’s Rust (1986). The…
Luke Haines: Bad Vibes
For the past fifteen years Luke Haines has been producing a solid body of music in a number of different guises, the best known of which is the Auteurs. If…
Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Midnight Classics, as far as I can tell, was an imprint of Serpent’s Tail reserved for publishing forgotten works of pulpy noir and psychedelic fiction. A number of titles were…
Gilbert Adair: And Then There Was No One
Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so…
booklit’s best of 2008
As the year ends with an unexpected reading slump, I know that I’m not going to get any new books written up before the end of the year, so feel…
Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo
Although he wrote few works in his lifetime, namely a thin volume of short stories (The Burning Plain and Other Stories) and a single novel, the name of Juan Rulfo…
J.M.G. Le Clézio: Terra Amata
When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save…
Florian Zeller: Artificial Snow
One of the pitfalls of reading literature in translation is that some authors see their work, if they see it all, come to the English language in a chronology all…
Evelio Rosero: The Armies
Colombia has, for some time now, been plagued by all manner of violence, starting with La Violencia in the late forties, through the rise of guerilla groups, and continuing to…
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher In The Rye
There are a number of novels out there that people are expected to have read at some point in their youth. Not to have done so is, in a word,…