Reif Larsen: The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet
Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet (2009) caused a bit of storm last year when the American rights were snapped up for almost a million dollars. Its interesting…
Eduardo Mendoza: No Word From Gurb
If aliens were to read Eduardo Mendoza’s No Word From Gurb (1990) they may well determine that it suffers from ‘structural simplicity’. While this is true, it makes it no…
Bragi Ólafsson: The Pets
Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets (2001) is the second release from Open Letter Books (Dubravka Ugrešić’s Nobody’s Home was the first) and their first piece of fiction. While it’s the first…
Saul Bellow: Dangling Man
Try as I might, I’ve never connected with Saul Bellow’s prose. My first attempt was The Actual, his penultimate work, and his shortest. A few pages in and I was…
John Steinbeck: To A God Unknown
Long ago I’d expressed an interest in reading the works of John Steinbeck in chronological order, starting with Cup Of Gold, his account of Sir Henry Morgan’s piratic life, and…
Ana María del Río: Carmen’s Rust
It’s thanks to a slurry of comments on Chilean literature in my review of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, that I come to Ana María del Río’s Carmen’s Rust (1986). The…
Luke Haines: Bad Vibes
For the past fifteen years Luke Haines has been producing a solid body of music in a number of different guises, the best known of which is the Auteurs. If…
Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Midnight Classics, as far as I can tell, was an imprint of Serpent’s Tail reserved for publishing forgotten works of pulpy noir and psychedelic fiction. A number of titles were…
Gilbert Adair: And Then There Was No One
Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so…
booklit’s best of 2008
As the year ends with an unexpected reading slump, I know that I’m not going to get any new books written up before the end of the year, so feel…