Belinda Webb: A Clockwork Apple
July 16, 2008
There’s an old idiom that states you can’t compare apples to oranges but in the case of Belinda Webb’s A Clockwork Apple (2008) you can’t help compare it to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, purely because it follows the source so closely.
Utopians’ bonfire of profanities
July 16, 2008
The two extremes reflect the ambivalent attitudes people have always had to burning books, says Fishburn, who works in the rare book business. People still burn books for all sorts of reasons, he tells the HES.
Romanian Literature in Translation
July 16, 2008
Romanian The Cultural Observer (Observatorul Cultural) launched a translation project which ‘will host Romanian fiction, poetry, literary criticism and literary history, and news about Romanian writing abroad, all translated into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish starting in May 2008′.
The project inaugurates with Stefan Banulescu’s Men in Winter. As a whole, Iarna barbatilor/Men in Winter offers a specifically local variety of magic realism, discovered in Romania in the 1960s through the intermediation of the South Americans—a trend at once oriental, Balkan and southern: fabulatory in the extreme. The essence of this “magic” is dislocation.
Dylan Thomas Prize longlist
July 14, 2008
They’ve announced the 14-title strong longlist for the £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers (under-thirties only)
Fishing in Utopia
July 14, 2008
The notion of Sweden as a modern democratic utopia has long beguiled the left and perplexed the right.

