Some End of the Year Reading Lists
In anticipation of announcing the fiction longlist for the “Best Translated Book of 2008” on Thursday, here are a couple other “year end” lists worth checking out. I don’t remember The Guardian using this format for its year end lists in the past, but then again, I have a hard time remembering ...
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World Literature Tour: Portugal
I always say that I’m going to check in regularly with the Guardian World Literature Tour, then completely fail. Hopefully this month things will be different as they “head off” to Portugal. Early on, the authors recommended are pretty well known—Jose Saramago, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and Eca de ...
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An Echo of My Post about Schuler
From Charlotte Higgins’s piece in The Guardian about shopping in her local Borders: Walk in and you are bombarded with the visual cacophony of three-for-two offers, TV chefs and Parky’s biography. Of course they have a wide selection of books, but the place is such a jungle – Aldi is surely more of a ...
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Another Way to Look at It
Over at the Guardian John Freeman steps to the plate as the latest American critic to try and defend the international quality of our writers from accusations of “insularity.” He looks to the quality of the fiction shortlist for the National Book Award, pointing out that this year’s list is littered with ...
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He Kind of Has a Point
From The Guardian blog post by Michael Caine about the recent (or not so) surge in reprinting “lost classics”: Take a closer look at this recent publishing wheeze, and it soon reduces to digging out the obscurer works of not-so-obscure writers. If you listen carefully you’ll notice something that sounds ...
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Books in Argentina
Over at the Guardian books blog, Karla Starr has a piece about the cost of books in Argentina: Then it occurred to me that it’s all down to purchasing power. Take Harry Potter – as plenty did both in Argentina and the UK. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sells for 108 pesos, which corresponds to the ...
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Amelie Nothomb in The Guardian
Michael Orthofer from Complete Review is responsible for getting me interested in Amelie Nothomb. He’s reviewed twelve of her books, grading all of them between a B and an A. (Most are in the A or A- range, with Loving Sabotage—published by New Directions—receiving an A+.) Unfortunately, despite this ...
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