Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö: Roseanna
“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real mystery: a woman’s…
“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real mystery: a woman’s…
There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (“Fourteen…
In Ichthyology, the opening story of David Vann’s collection, Legend Of A Suicide (2008), there appears a fly that gets stuck in a fishtank and, in its panic, sends off…
Science fiction has been in the news a lot these days, most notably with Kim Stanley Robinson’s much publicised criticism about the lack of recognition awarded to the genre by…
The American writer Robert Coover would appear to be a dot on the landscape of British literary consciousness – I don’t know how well known he is in the States…
Alexander Pope is considered one of England’s greatest poets of the eighteenth century, known for satirical poems as The Rape Of The Lock and the Dunciad. He was a member…
Having intended, at one time, to read the books of Philip Roth in order of publication, a brick wall was soon hit with second book, Letting Go, Roth’s first novel…
It’s called Scotland’s shame, the sectarianism that has attached itself to Scottish society and festers therein. The absorption of Ireland’s exiles in the nineteenth century saw Catholicism take steps into…
It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translations, The Savage…
A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary writers who, over the last twenty years, has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, and more. In…