Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole
At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler there is a passage on the various types of books we meet in our lives, such as…
Vladimir Nabokov: Mary
Although it was his first novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926) was not translated until 1970, and one can well imagine the author peering over translator Michael Glenny‘s shoulder as he…
Alberto Manguel: With Borges
When it comes to Jorge Luis Borges, I’m more aware of him and his contribution to letters than I am versed in him. A few short stories from Labyrinths is…
Gordon Burn: Born Yesterday
Having had the experience of reading Gordon Burn’s fiction – Fullalove, a novel about a hack journalist intruding on the bereaved to get a story – and his non-fiction –…
Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus
Here begins my Roth odyssey. And where better to start than the beginning? So, with that obvious logic in mind, the first in an oeuvre spanning twenty-eight books (a mix…
Alain Elkann: Envy
Alain Elkann has, in the last thirty years, published over twenty books spanning essays, biography, and fiction. Envy (2006) is the first, as far as I’m aware, of his works…
James Meek: We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
When it comes to writing a novel, there are two approaches: doing it for the art and doing it for the money. In James Meek’s novel, We Are Now Beginning…
Martin Amis: Night Train
Love him or hate him for his outspoken views on this, that, and the other, you can’t deny that Martin Amis has a way with words. And I say this…
Ismail Kadare: Agamemnon’s Daughter
When it comes to reputations, Ismail Kadare’s is one that certainly precedes him. Having come from nowhere (well, I hadn’t heard of him, at least) to scoop the inaugural MAN…
Kurt Vonnegut: A Man Without A Country
It’s a mistake to subtitle Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country (2005) with “a memoir of life in George W. Bush’s America” since a) it’s not much of a…