Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl
The Guardian has a ‘digested read’ of Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl: The most notable event of the summer of 1950 was the arrival in Miraflores of two flamboyant Chilean sisters. I was just 15 and fell in love with the older one, Lily, like a calf. We were inseparable; we held hands, though she teased me ...
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Naguib Mahfouz review
Financial Times reviews Naguib Mahfouz’s final novel, Morning and Evening Talk: In Morning and Evening Talk, his last novel, he sets the bar high, refusing all the classical unities. Instead of rooting his story in one place, he flits between Cairo and the countryside. Instead of following a chronology, he races ...
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50 Greatest Books Ever Written
Over the coming year, an international panel chosen by The Globe and Mail will select the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Each week, a single work will be discussed by an expert or a writer passionate about the work in question. This is the second in the series. This week, they’re talking about In Search of Lost ...
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In a vault, in Switzerland
Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I’m hopelessly conflicted about it. It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov ...
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The conglomeration of the French publishing industry
André Schiffrin in Eurozine on the (all-too-familiar) recent history of the French publishing industry. The problem that arises in all these countries is: when you have bought a company that makes two or three per cent you want it to make ten or twelve per cent. Hachette wants ten per cent; Editis wants fifteen, as does ...
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Chinese Literature Overview
Richard Lea has a two-part [ 1, 2 ] overview of the literary scene in China in The Guardian: The world’s most populous nation, the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials, and now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, China strides irresistibly towards its economic and political destiny. But ...
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Map of Europe
Here’s a map of the languages of Europe. Click the map to see the
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