TMO Tags: writers and politics
The Port Huron Statement – Fifty Years On
Monday, June 11th, 2012As we wait for the definitive manifesto of Occupy Movement to be written – if that is possible given the diverse range of opinions and voices that are associated with it – this is arguably an opportune moment to look back 50 years at another radical grouping , which did succeed in putting together and [...]
Literature as an anti-memorial – Amy Waldman in interview
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012Amy Waldman’s debut novel The Submission rightfully earned its way onto numerous ‘books of the year’ lists at the end of 2011, and was shortlisted for The Guardian’s First Book Award. Waldman, also a succesful journalist, talks to TMO about the novel, 9/11 fiction, and the links between literature and journalism. Martin Amis noted, in his [...]
Terrorism in Dostoevsky and Conrad
Thursday, April 26th, 2012In the world of fictional drama, terrorists are useful and popular – useful to writers who want to propel their plots, and popular with viewers and readers who find subversives so compelling. They’re intelligent, driven characters, they’re prepared to kill or be killed and they think that moral good can be achieved by immoral acts. [...]
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 [...]
The truth, the whole truth and… – Mike Daisey, Apple and Foxconn
Friday, March 23rd, 2012Mike Daisey admitted to stretching the truth in his monologue The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, but when tech journalists say that Daisey, as a monologist, had ‘no business’ telling the story in the first place, it begs the question who does, and are they telling it correctly?
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 [...]
Maps for Lost Lovers – Nadeem Aslam
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011Nadeem Aslam’s second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers took him eleven years to write, and is the story of an immigrant community in England struggling in the aftermath of the dissappearance of two illicit lovers.
The Istanbul Declaration of The European Writers’ Parliament 2010
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011Many of us travelling to the European Writers’ Parliament, convened in Istanbul for that city’s Capital of Culture year, were puzzled. Taking its lineage from previous gatherings of writers (during the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the occasion of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, etc), it seemed to us that this parliament lacked a focus. We [...]
From George Orwell to Vaclav Havel – translating the language of democracy
Monday, June 1st, 2009Any 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 [...]
