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 [...]
The TMO Litblog
The TMO litblog is a collection of short posts, reviews, and tweets dedicated to literary fiction and book news.
How I Learned to Read Again
Tuesday, January 15th, 2013Inhabiting the Narrative – Housekeeping and the Hounds of Love
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012Being a Girl You’ve seen the film: a man looks behind an office filing cabinet to find a portal into another man’s consciousness – someone who turns out to be a famous actor. The intruder remains inside this other life for a quarter of an hour or so before being ejected onto the side of [...]
Melville’s Moby Dick in the Digital Age
Thursday, October 4th, 2012From their shared fascination with Moby-Dick, writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne came together to curate, first, an installation in Plymouth, England, celebrating the book – Dominion: A Whale Symposium. They put together a book with the same title earlier this year then organised and recently launched the Moby-Dick Big Read (www.mobydickbigread.co.uk), a website [...]
I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński – A review
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent [...]
Sluts, Opportunists and Martin Amis – The Pregnant Widow
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012A lot of people are cynical about the sexual revolution. Most acknowledge that the new set of sex and dating rules has produced ‘confusion’. Some go so far as to label it ‘anarchy’ that will ‘destroy society’. We are told that women can have sex like men if they want to – that consenting adults [...]
The Novelist’s Lexicon – Edited by Villa Gillet / Le Monde
Monday, February 6th, 2012“A poem often has a moment or a movement or an image, to deal with, not a whole series or interrelated and elaborated sequences, nor that sense of duration and vicarious experience that the novel brings. The best a novel can do is use its superstructure, all those cumulative bits of housekeeping, to achieve poem-moments, [...]
Going Postal in The Underground: Lowboy
Thursday, January 26th, 2012I 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 [...]
Litblog’s weekly tweets –
Sunday, September 18th, 2011Per Petterson and the notion of contemporary existentialism – http://t.co/vql31bV # A.L Kennedy )@writerer) on inspiration http://t.co/kLNOR9c # On reading the opening of Peter Handke's The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick http://t.co/dx3XbW2 # great article on the success of one of our favourite publishing houses -@EuropaEditions http://t.co/M3PwyHi # RT @boduweb how the crowd is [...]
Litblog’s weekly tweets –
Sunday, August 21st, 2011Great (audio) interview with John Banville/Benjamin Black – http://t.co/CnLxO2d # the novel is one of Europe’s greatest gifts… America and Africa gave the world jazz. We’ll call it even. http://t.co/YVD2ZVm # "E-books do involve lower costs, but only in manufacturing and distribution" – Jamie Byng interviewed by GQ http://t.co/jybH0kp # Here's what I hate about [...]
