Belinda Webb: A Clockwork Apple

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

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

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

They’ve announced the 14-title strong longlist for the £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers (under-thirties only)

Fishing in Utopia

The notion of Sweden as a modern democratic utopia has long beguiled the left and perplexed the right.

F. Kafka, Everyman

If few readers of Kafka can be truly sorry for the existence of the works Kafka had consigned to oblivion, many regret the way Brod chose to present them.

Everybody needs to get thicker skins

Readers have voted Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children their favourite Booker prize-winner of all time – and it’s not even his best-known work

Men in White [Netherland by Joseph O’Neill]

The ambiguous title fits a novel remarkable for its complex geographical situation. Joseph O’Neill, with his mixed Irish and Turkish parentage, and a childhood spent partly in the Hague, now lives in New York City

Who are scientists?

The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939

Uncommon Arrangements explores the dynamics of seven miserable ‘marriages à la mode’. From the hell that was life with H G Wells (‘I am thinking continually’, wrote his wife, who shared him with a harem, ‘of the disappointing mess of it’) to the weirdness of being loved

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