Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer, a Palestinian activist who has legally contested land seizures. He is also one of the founders of Al Haq, a non-governmental organisation that works to protect human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.
More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, he is a walker and a writer. These [...]

Derek Raymond, the English noir writer whom Interpol knew better as Robin Cook, could spell in at least two languages, as his dystopian novel A State of Denmark proves. Leave aside comparisons to Orwell, with the novel’s imagined totalitarian England run by a media-backed dictator called Jobling, and instead concentrate on the words frazione, presa, [...]

You probably wouldn’t pick one of Northern Ireland’s best known poets, academic - and traditional music enthusiast to boot - to be the novelist to have translated the spirit of the internet into book form. In Shamrock Tea  (2001) though Ciaran Carson has, in my humble view, done exactly that - and there’s not a hint [...]

4th Estate celebrate their 25th birthday this year, and to mark it have produced a very nice film which reminds you of many of the great books they’ve published

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
Some favourites here include Michael Chabon’s novels, Robert Fisk’s huge book on the middle east, and most recently [...]

‘You couldn’t make it up’, screams the tabloid tv presenter as he recounts the surreal situation of Santa Claus and his helper elves being threatened by angry families in a run-down amusement park in the cultural wilderness of Kent.
Far more entertaining, though starting from a similar run-down amusement park premise, is George Saunders brilliant Civilwarland [...]

My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to not recommend any book until I’ve finished it. That gives me a couple of weeks to indulge my particular blogging vice, and there’s no better place to start than Abraham B. Yehoshua’s wonderful A Woman in Jerusalem, which I can’t recommend highly enough even though I’m only [...]

The Cellist of Sarajevo is Canadian novelist Steven Galloway’s third novel, but only the first to be published in the UK & Ireland. I picked up the novel enthusiastically (it’s beautifully put together, from the elegant cover through to the paging and paper-weight) but also with the slight apprehension that always accompanies a novel that [...]

While Carlo Lucarelli’s detective novel Carte Blanche includes plenty of standard genre devices, it’s unlikely to turn up in the excellent ‘do it yourself giallo generator‘ (via Detectives without borders). For one thing its title is too short, and doesn’t contain an animal (not that the inclusion of an animal in the title necessarily makes [...]

The Tailor and Ansty (sometimes known as The Tailor and Anstey) by Eric Cross was considered so fiendishly obscene or indecent in its general tendency that it was for many years banned in Ireland. When parts of it were quoted in a Seanad (senate) debate in the 1940s there were calls for the quoted bits [...]

At the start of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, the narrator is rung-up by a mysterious female voice who demands, like a survey-taker, ten minutes of his time:
“Ten minutes, please,” said a woman on the other end.
I’m good at recognizing people’s voices, but this was not one I knew.
“Excuse me? To whom did [...]

I have no idea whether Sherry Jone’s novel The Jewel of Medina originally deserved to be published, and I’m not quick off the bat to scold Random House, the publisher which decided at the last minute to not publish the novel after they were warned that it may cause offence to Muslims. Publishing is a subjective [...]

A popular arts show in Italy, Che tempo che fa, has appealed to viewers to write in to the show requesting books that, currently out-of-print, they’d like to see re-published by authors.
Top of the list is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis.
Another surprising  entry is Alan Hollinghurst’s recent Booker winning novel The Line of Beauty [...]

Is Chuck Palahniuk one of America’s most underrated or overrated novelists? The answer to the question probably revolves around your attitude towards the shocking, because he is without doubt a novelist with the power to churn the stomach (although the reported faintings at readings of his short story ‘Guts’ seems exaggerated to me).
Speaking to Three [...]

Regular readers of Three Monkeys will know that we have a soft-spot for the Italian literary collective Wu Ming, the people behind novels like Q and 54 (which is very much on our ‘to-review’ list). Wu Ming I (there are five of them) has just published a thoughtful piece where he attempts to define what [...]

I very rarely have the cause or inclination to browse to the Financial Times, but was glad to have done so today. The immediate reasoning was to check for news on the troubled bank of which I am, unfortunately, an account holder. No particular joy there, but instead I stumbled upon an extract from Margaret [...]

Over at the Guardian book blog there’s a debate blowing after a post  dealing with Jim Crace’s plans to retire. The post has provoked all sorts of reactions regarding the merits of a writer’s age/youth, many largely missing the point made by Crace.
Perhaps the most worrying thing, though, regarding the post is the implication that [...]

Some posts ago we took up the ‘who’ll be literature’s radiohead’ argument up, suggesting that there are already a number of established authors who have been giving away their work a la In Rainbows - for example the Wu Ming foundation or Mega-bestseller Neil Gaiman.
Word comes through (via Lizzy’s Literary Life) of a new publishing [...]

Back in the ‘90s, I read Tobias Wolff’s memoirs of growing up in a struggling, single-parent family - This Boy’s Life (1989) - and of serving as a junior officer in the U.S. airborne division in Vietnam - In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994). I was impressed by both books, for the honesty [...]

“‘Modern art is actually a means of espionage. … If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.’” This is not the paranoid ravings of some modern-day war on terror nut. It is quoted in Who Paid the Piper? The [...]

Sarah Loud,head of digital publishing at Pan Macmillan, has published a much talked about Publisher’s manifesto for the 21st Century over at The Digatilist.
It’s a long piece, and well worth reading. It starts with a fairly common position, that in this social-media/internet/mobile entertainment world the days of the book are numbered.  
“More and more books [...]