a literary handout
I bought the new Penguin Classic, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Japanese author, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), with the intention of furthering my knowledge of Japanese fiction and its writers…
First published in 2000, Atiq Rahimi’s Earth And Ashes is a short novella set in his native Afghanistan (he’s another one of those writers that run away to France, like…
Ignorance, by Milan Kundera, is a small novel but big on ideas. Playing like a watered down Odyssey, two Czech émigrés return to post-communist Prague after twenty years. A chance…
Lamb, by Bernard MacLaverty, is, at 150 pages, a short read, but its brevity serves only to provide a perfectly told story without padding or exposition. It follows the story…
It was the intention of James Meek that his third novel, The People’s Act of Love, should be written in the manner of the great Russian novels. While I have…
For those who have never heard of Hypatia the back of this book gives you a quick summary of the woman: Hypatia – brilliant mathematician, eloquent Neoplatonist, and a woman…
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling…
A Sweet Scent Of Death is the second novel by Mexican author and screenplay writer, Guillermo Arriaga, although you probably sort-of know him better as the guy who wrote Amores…
Michel Faber’s The Courage Consort is one of those books where you wish it were longer or part of a collection. A novella of 150 pages it follows the story…
Reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was inspired by realising that I hadn’t read any of a recent list stating the top twenty geek novels. Given that my impressions of…