Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

TMO: Andrew Lawless

Andrew Lawless is the founding editor of Three Monkeys Online. Originally from Dublin, but now based in Bologna, Italy, Andrew is a regular contributor to the magazine with a particular interest in literature, politics and music. He also runs Bodu Web Design, a web development company.


TMO Articles by Andrew Lawless



  • 5 Italian Cities to visit in 2015

      If you’ve set your sights on visiting Italy this year, but want to avoid the standard tourist traps of Venice, Florence and Rome, here’s a list of five beautiful and often overlooked cities to visit. All are easily reachable, and have a lot to offer. Trieste Just over two hours by train from Venice, […]

  • Kate Mosse, novelist, in interview with TMO

    History, place and the novelist: Kate Mosse in Interview

    Patience and place are two key components to Kate Mosse‘s approach to writing. For Mosse, the best-selling author of the Languedoc trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre, and Citadel), as well as the novels The Winter Ghost and her most recent The Taxidermist’s Daughter (not to mention the short stories, earlier novels, non-ficiton, and plays!) stories come when […]

  • The Global Minotaur – Economist Yanis Varoufakis in interview

    Have you had the suspicion that simple narratives about subprime mortgages, last minute bail-outs, and sweaty-palmed bankers fail to adequately explain what has happened to the global economy since 2008?  If so, then I can heartily recommend you pick up a copy of  Yanis Varoufakis‘s The Global Minotaur – America, Europe and the Future of […]

  • Women Under Siege – the use of rape as a weapon of war

    The International Criminal Court made legal history in February 2002, when it ruled in what has become known as the’rape camp‘ case that the systematic rape of women in the town of Foca constituted a crime against humanity. In Slavenka Drakulić’s book They Would Never Hurt a Fly – War Criminals on Trial in the […]

  • The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

    Reading through numerous reviews of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap helped me clarify why it’s such a particularly strong novel; not because they’re uniformly positive, but because almost all that I’ve read take a strong line on the book – I’ve yet to come across a review that didn’t engage wholeheartedly with the novel, which […]

  • They Kill Us for Sport – Lear, Happy Endings, and Niccolò Ammaniti’s The Crossroads

    Daisy Godwin’s lament about the lack of redmption in so many of today’s novels – made whilst chairing the Orange Prize judging panel – put her in good company. Samuel Johnson famously endorsed  Nahum Tate‘s sugar coated revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The play had been too bleak, by far, for a Restoration audience, prompting Tate […]

  • Doubt in the Novel – Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven

    In a TMO interview with Australian novelist Tim Winton, the question of faith and doubt came up, and more specifically the suitability of different literary formats to deal with them. “TMO:How much room  in a novel is there for the unexplained, and the unexplainable? Tim Winton: I think there’s plenty of room. For hinting at […]

  • Harry Revised – by Mark Sarvas

    It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas‘s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped – almost Bloom like – by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte […]

  • The Wig My Father Wore – by Anne Enright

    Coming off the back of reading more than my fair share of European crime-fiction (culminating with Stieg Larsson’s posthumuous sales-phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) – a genre where plot, reasonably enough, is tight and pragmatic, where the reader must above all else understand what’s happening – it was a palate-cleansing delight to dive […]

  • More visions of Italy – Deirdre Madden’s ‘Remembering Light and Stone’

    It’s June, so breaking a New Year’s resolution I return again to blog briefly about a book that I’ve just started – Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone. I couldn’t resist because of this wonderful passage on Italy – tying in nicely with BB Scimmia’s post of some time ago on Imagining Italy Madden’s narrator […]

  • Paolo Giordano, Italian novelist, talks to tmo

    Paolo Giordano – Bridging the ‘two cultures’

    TMO interview with Premio Strega winning Italian novelist Paolo Giordano “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked […]

  • The Lazarus Project – Aleksandar Hemon

    Novelist and  short-story writer Michel Faber, in his three monkeys interview, commented “I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.” This is […]

  • Domenico Starnone’s First Execution

    It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty – despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended. It has though, thus far (I’m […]

  • John Wray, author of Lowboy, in interview

    For many readers, particularly outside the United States, John Wray’s name will be a new one, despite the fact that this 37 year old Brooklyn-based writer has already published two critically acclaimed novels, The Right Hand of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue, has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, and in 2007 was chosen by Granta for […]

  • Michel Houellebecq’s Platform

    “If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the […]