guardian.co.uk — Novels from Matt Beaumont and Niall Griffiths and a poetry collection from Gill McEvoy are among the books under review this week.The great feature of our newly improved user profiling system is that you can find out more about where reviewers are coming from (critical authority, as AggieH has pointed...
paulocoelhoblog — In my notes for the year 1989 I come across some sentences jotted down from a conversation I had with J, whom I call my “master.” At that time we were talking about an unknown mystic called Kenan Rifai, about whom little has been written. “Kenan Rifai says that when...
guardian.co.uk — His prolific output of sensational stories for the popular press should not obscure the incomparable art of his best work"He is a better writer than you think," Malcolm Lowry once said of Guy de Maupassant. This comment, made to David Markson, indicates the conundrum Maupassant presents to readers. A hugely...
guardian.co.uk — Our literary trip to Vietnam reviews three books haunted by the spectres of war and authoritarian ruleThe Sorrow of War by Bao NinhThis rare account of the American (aka Vietnam) war by a North Vietnamese army veteran, although fiction, revealed truths to many people inside and outside Vietnam. The main...
lrb.co.uk — On a damp, chill, blustery August afternoon in Whitby a few years ago I overheard a disgruntled holidaymaker declaiming – to his family, to anyone who would listen, to the wind – that ‘global warming is a load of codswallop.’ One of his children, a boy of around ten, was...
lrb.co.uk — In January 2010, Jonathan Katz was working in Haiti for the Associated Press, the only American news organisation with a permanent bureau there. Other foreign journalists lived there, and a few more flew in for elections and catastrophes, but for the most part Haiti coverage had become a casualty of...
lrb.co.uk — Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach...
lrb.co.uk — The narrator of The Woman Upstairs is Nora Eldridge, and from the start she describes herself as something of a non-entity. ‘I’m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blonde nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain.’ She’s 42 and ‘neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call...
guardian.co.uk — This might be the best attempt yet to film Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Which is not to say this is a good filmWriting about Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby in relation to F Scott Fitzgerald's prose, is like trying to describe a gorilla playing with a Fabergé egg. There it is, this great hairy,...
paulocoelhoblog — by Pramiti Sapru Scars; they seem so beautiful at times. I’ve got many, deep and shallow. They aren’t self-inflicted, well consciously they aren’t. They cover my arms, my legs, even my fingers are painted with them. To others it might seem like a cry for help or a careless attitude...
guardian.co.uk — A tweet from the Swedish Academy has unleashed a flood of speculation about the five writers they are considering - could it be Don Delillo's year, or perhaps it's Murakami's turnThere's been a flurry of gossip over the Nobel prize for literature, thanks to GalleyCat and the Literary Saloon, who...
paulocoelhoblog — As you noticed, the blog changed its visual. Suphi did a great job, but there are probably a lot of things that we missed. So please list your comments/suggestions/etc. below Love Paulo
guardian.co.uk — This week's sale of acclaimed first editions signed by their authors, which I've helped organise, invites a few questions – which I've set out to answer hereMy bookselling colleagues wonder if I have gone walkabout, my business colleague Peter Grogan shrugs his shoulders, my bank manager phones solicitously. How am...
guardian.co.uk — The concerns of Orwells's 1946 essay remain notably relevant to the changes in written language wrought by the digital ageSome while ago, with reference to Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English language", I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now,...
guardian.co.uk — A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical techniqueThis week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and epigrams by the newly-rediscovered Elizabethan poet, Robert Sidney. It's untitled, but numbered "Sonnet 30", and begins, aptly for a re-emergent poet,...
paulocoelhoblog — Every day, God gives us the sun – and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived the moment, that it doesn’t exist – that today is the same as yesterday and...
omnivoracious — After naming Sylvia Day’s Bared to You a 2012 Best Book of the Year in Romance and devouring Reflected in You, we've been anxiously awaiting the release of the third book in Day's scorching Crossfire series, Entwined with You. To whet our appetites and make waiting for the book's arrival...
guardian.co.uk — Concrete fiction from Stephen Marche and a Martian adventure with Ken Kalfus are among this week's books under reviewThis week's reviews included a new discovery for me. He is Stephen Marche, whose Love and the Mess We're In is intriguingly reviewed by Robert Nathan. He opens:Love and the Mess We're...
guardian.co.uk — Fiction writers face a challenge in depicting the ubiquitous 21st-century experience of virtual existenceWe live more and more of our life through the screens of laptops and smartphones, but how do we represent this on the page? In his 2004 novel Eastern Standard Tribe, science fiction author Cory Doctorow explored...
guardian.co.uk — Has the question of genre in fiction become 'a flimsy irrelevence' or will the mores of the book trade maintain the distinctions?This week, the chair of this year's Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison's Climbers. In it, he says "let...
paulocoelhoblog — One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone. If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is...
