Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Is there a book in this blog? TMO's Litblog brings you reviews, reflections and literary news

The TMO Litblog

The TMO litblog is a collection of short posts, reviews, and tweets dedicated to literary fiction and book news.

Elena Ferrante and the Premio Strega

Thursday, June 18th, 2015

Elena Ferrante’s novel The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final novel in her Neopolitan series, has made the final five shortlist for Italy’s Premio Strega prize – and not without controversy. Ferrante was first nominated for Italy’s biggest prize 23 years ago, with her first novel L’amore molesto (Troubling Love). It didn’t […]

Tahar Ben Jelloun talks about Prostate Cancer, Virility, and the United Nations

Monday, May 12th, 2014

Tahar Ben Jelloun, the prize winning Moroccan novelist and essayist, author of books including The Sand Child,The Sacred night, and This Blinding Absence of Light, has been talking, at the Turin book fair about his latest novel L’Ablation. The novel which is already a best-seller in France, and has just been published in Italy, tells […]

Celebrating the Centenary of Joyce’s Dubliners

Thursday, May 1st, 2014

James Joyce‘s hugely influential short story collection Dubliners was published in 1914, and there are lots of publications / events and even apps to celebrate the centenary. One very exciting project is Dubliners 100. The new Irish literary publishers Tramp Press (founded by Sarah Davis-Goff* and Lisa Coen) invited a number of respected Irish writers […]

Italian right-wing protests against same-sex marriage novel

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

Teenage students, brandishing neo-fascist banners, protested this week outside Rome’s Giulio Cesare high-school. The object of their protest? The latest novel, ‘Sei come Sei‘ (roughly translated as ‘you are what you are’)  by one of Italy’s most respected contemporary novelists, Melania G. Mazzucco – winner of the 2003 Premio Strega; more specifically the students were protesting […]

How I Learned to Read Again

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

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 […]

Inhabiting the Narrative – Housekeeping and the Hounds of Love

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

Being 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, 2012

From 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, 2012

In 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, 2012

A 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, […]