Nowadays I would be put off reading a book labelled controversial and exciting gossipy attention on TV and in newspapers, but in 1989 I read Alexander Stuart's The War Zone that did exactly that. It was later made into a co…
This is one of my most surprising discoveries in second-hand bookshop trawls in the far off days when they existed, especially because it was found in Portsmouth, not the most literary of cities despite Dickens and Conan-Doyle (o…
Although we are unmusical, we have a tradition of singing Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk The first reason to celebrate Shelley Frisch’s new translation into English of Kafka’s short prose written in the village of Z…
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us , says Kafka in the famous letter. I wondered what this might mean as the 'books of the year' lists began to appear last month. Imagine if each contributor constraine…
"My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words" writes Fernando Sdrigotti . "I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else aro…
You have made me unhappy. I bought your "Metamorphosis" as a present for my cousin, but she doesn't know what to make of the story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn't know what to make of it either…
I don't know how people can read an emotional novel. Unless the reader is hoodwinked into thinking the novel can deliver 'real' emotion. — Lee Rourke (@LeeRourke) August 14, 2013 Twitter is an unreliable arena…
A question arises from my breathless response to volume one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle : have I contradicted my exasperated review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger ? At least, this is a question I ask myself. After al…
I think we ought to read only books that wound and stab us. Kafka's letter, sent one hundred and eight years ago, is one I've quoted often enough and I'm reluctant to do so again. If the book we are reading doesn&#…