Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones
Despite existing in some literary middle ground between short story collection and novel, Jim Crace’s debut, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His encore, The Gift of Stones…
Kerstin Ekman: The Dog
“Where does something begin?” is the opening line to Kerstin Ekman‘s The Dog (1986, tr. Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright, 2009), and it seems at first a silly question. Where…
Yuri Herrera: Kingdom Cons
While Yuri Herrera already has two novels rendered in English, his third to be translated, Kingdom Cons (2008, tr. Lisa Dillman, 2017) was actually his debut. A slim volume, like…
Dexter Palmer: Version Control
Technology in the early twenty-first century is changing our lives — the way we do tasks; how we interact with friends; how we meet potential partners. The rise of Big…
David Markson: This Is Not A Novel
The tributes that followed the recent death of David Markson inspired me to pick up one of his novels, something I’d been hesitant about before. Cursory flicks in the book…
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…
Kressmann Taylor: Address Unknown
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…
David Vann: Legend Of A Suicide
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…
Walter Tevis: The Man Who Fell To Earth
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…
Robert Coover: Briar Rose
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…