The TMO Literature and Books section collects together in-depth author interviews, book reviews, publishing news, and literary criticism in the form of essays and articles. We have also added a new section for original fiction and poetry (for submission guidelines see here).
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Inside Viola Di Grado’s Head
Viola di Grado is one of Italy’s most exciting and critically acclaimed new authors. Her debut novel Settanta acrilico trenta lana – published in english under the title 70% acrylic 30% wool – won the prestigious Premio Campiello Opera Prima prize (Previous winners include Alessandro Piperno and Paolo Giordano), and her second novel Cuore Cavo [...]
Mario Vargas Llosa takes a swing at Murakami, Auster, Kundera and Assange?
Nobel laureate for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa is interviewed in the weekend edition of Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper, on the occasion of the Italian publication of his book La civilización del espectáculo (in Italian La civiltà dello spettacolo). His short book/pamphlet – not to be confused with Guy deBord’s The Society of the Spectacle - warns in [...]
Beautiful Noise – Helen Seymour Interview
‘Dublin,Ireland. 1985. A war is raging between The Government, RTE [the Irish state broadcaster] and the 28 illegal Pirate radio stations, who have taken control of the Nation’s airwaves and the advertising revenue that goes with it’- so reads the description on the cover of Helen Seymour’s debut novel, Beautiful Noise- a story about an [...]
From the Chalet School to Hunger Games
How do British schoolgirl classics like the Chalet School and Mallory Towers translate to todays bestsellers like Twighlight and The Hunger Games? Amy Ellis-Thomas compares the stock situations and rhetoric of the 1950s boarding schools to today’s equally codified young adult literature.
On Losing Iain Banks
“Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and [...]
Meike Ziervogel’s Magda
Meike Ziervogel is a writer and journalist living in London. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London to study Arabic language and literature. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an independent publishing industry dedicated to producing contemporary European novellas in English translation1. In 2012 she was voted as one of the top [...]
Kahlil Gibran and the Fall of the Prophet
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying. - Marcel Proust In the summer of 2011, I was sitting in a packed church. The soon-to-be married couple were exchanging vows. The groom recited the following quote: Love one another, but [...]
Extracting Gold – Mary Costello interview
Mary Costello is the author of The China Factory, a collection of short stories which was published by The Stinging Fly Press. It has received much acclaim and renown for its intensity and sensitivity. Costello has an amazing capacity to reveal characters’ lives through understated encounters, be it the restraint of two strangers in The [...]
How I Learned to Read Again
I can’t remember learning to talk but I do remember learning to read. As the youngest of four, I had an urgent need to be able to read even before I started school. All around me, my family’s heads were buried in Mills and Boon, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Mickey Spillane, Charles Dickens or the [...]
Going Postal in The Underground: Lowboy
I have always had a morbid attraction to psychologically unstable characters- a penchant which I guess says more about me than the author/character in question, however, I can’t help wondering what it is that keeps us interested in the insane. It’s probably the mystery or the idea that there must be a kind of cipher [...]
From George Orwell to Vaclav Havel – translating the language of democracy
Any English—speaker to whom Vaclav Havel has mattered owes a debt they’re probably unaware of to Paul Wilson. His work as the Czech writer’s translator began thirty years ago but I discover, over a cup of coffee off Russell Square, that he first came to London from his native Canada ten years before that, to [...]
