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 b?rba?ilor/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.

Caution: Might Contain French

The literary space covered by English online resources is vast, yet the flavour of the news broad-casted in other languages can’t be ignored.

France’s Le Figaro presents every Tuesday a writer that made the headlines. And this Tuesday is Max Gallo, and his discourse upon his election into the French Academy (L’Académie française) where he emotionally mentions his origins, Italian immigrants, in order to highlight the French openness in matters of national identity.

Belgium’s La Libre writes: The Theater of ideas: fifty five debaters for the understanding of the zest and the agonies of a disoriented world.
The Life After (La Vie D’Apres) is the story of the author’s mother, Louanne Antrim, spaced in the saga of a dysfunctional family shaken by divorce, alcohol, illness. Via Cyberpresse, Canada.

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.

Places Of Interest

The Believer: Interview with Tom McCarthy

The Smart Set: Nobody’s a Critic

Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture.

John Sutherland, Blogs at The Guardian: So farewell then, lit-crit

But this traditionally vibrant sector, with its myriad outlets, is on the wane. Terminally, it would seem. Pages are falling away, like leaves in autumn. They used, for example, to call the literary pages in the New Statesman “the back half”. Now it’s “the back sixth (in a good week)”. Why is lit-crit - as a main item in our cultural diet - going down the tubes? Some hypothetical answers may be suggested:

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

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