a literary handout
When reading a book you can reasonably expect a clear delineation of author, reader, and character. Not so in Danielle Mémoire’s 1994 literary exercise, Public Reading Followed by Discussion (tr.…
Dead Lands (2021, tr: Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent, 2022), by Núria Bendicho, is a southern gothic in northeastern Spain, occupying a grim Faulknerian microcosm in and around a Catalonian…
Killing your darlings is well-worn advice given to writers labouring over something that just isn’t working and would be better excised from their work. However, in Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t,…
To Be Taught If Fortunate (2019) by Becky Chambers opens with an undisclosed situation on a exo-planet in the 22nd century and then recounts the story so far. Told by…
Alice, the Sausage (2003, tr. Catherine Petit and Paul Buck, 2006) was the debut novel of French writer Sophie Jabés and published in English by Dedalus Books as part of…
Banquet for the Damned (2004) is what happens when you take the Scottish town of St Andrews and lay over it Casting the Runes by MR James. Though there are…
With good writers it can take some time for us to become their contemporaries.” writes John Lanchester in his introduction to Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973). This is certainly…
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the one of those books that, on coming into 2022, I felt I ought to have read by now. It’s another title, like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four…
Jacobé and Fineta by Catalan writer Joaquim Ruyra (tr. Alan Yates, and published by Fum d’Estampa, 2022) are two short stories from early in the twentieth century, originally gathered in…
His Bloody Project (2015) is a classic found document story, ostensibly presented as a collection of documents relating to a historical triple murder in a remote part of Scotland in…