English as she is spoke
In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get ...
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Danish Issue of The Literary Review
Over at Absinthe’s blog, Thomas Kennedy introduces the latest issue of The Literary Review, which he edited and which focuses on new Danish writing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of content online, but it’s worth a look. (Beware! The content that is online is in what a good friend of ours appropriately ...
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Stephen Mitchelmore on Senselessness
Over at Ready Steady Book, Stephen reviews Senselessness: The uncommon, elongated noun describing the mental state of the father is enough to remind the reader of Bernhard’s 1967 novel Verstörung — translated as Gargoyles yet meaning “disturbance” — in which a doctor takes his student son ...
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Hosam Aboul-Ela on Egypt
Hosam Aboul-Ela provides a brief overview of Egyptian writers on Words Without Borders: Collectively, these novels embody contemporary Egyptian society’s tendency to play with time. The visitor feels time is moving backward and forward simultaneously here. Every time I stay for more than a few months, I’m impressed ...
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Literary Perspectives: Austria
This is why I love Eurozine: Though still routinely referred to as Germans, Austrian novelists have experienced a recent run of critical and commercial success. The “difficult” prose of the past has been replaced by a focus on story-telling, with women writers producing no less interesting work in the genre ...
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The Economist on E-books and POD
There’s not a lot new here, but some of the numbers are interesting. The e-book market tripled from 2005…to $30M? Although e-books may one day transform the industry, another new technology that is less visible to readers is already making itself felt. Print on Demand (POD), which allows books to be printed ...
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Nicholas Spice on Jelinek
Nicholas Spice reviews Elfride Jelinek’s Greed in the LRB: In Greed, Jelinek finds a way to deal with depth (with the abyss inside the human) without either reverting to the analgesic of realism or exhausting the reader with flood-lit ugliness. For all its derangement, Greed is not ugly. Indeed, once one has got ...
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