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 […]
A good starting place to talk about Steven Galloway’s novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, is a 1976 interview with American author John Cheever. Cheever, asked by the Paris Review’s Annette Grant about the trend for novelists to write journalism, responded angrily “I don’t like your question. Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot […]
“To create a democracy, blood must sometimes be spilled”. These would be wise words were it not for the fact that they were pronounced by Augusto Pinochet, one of the greatest mass-murderers of the 20th century. Pinochet’s seizure of power on September 11th 1973, an earlier 9/11 which produced a similarly catastrophic scene – that […]
If you’re looking for the place where Michael Jackson intersects with Al-Qaeda, look no further than Algerian born novelist Aziz Chouaki’s The Star of Algiers. Have we got your attention? Good. In truth, Jackson figures only slightly in this urgent, rythmic novel, and then only as a musical/cultural influence on the protagonist Moussa Massy, but […]
It’s virtually impossible to pigeonhole author Michel Faber, as his new collection of short stories The Fahrenheit Twins ably demonstrates. A collection of seventeen wildly different stories that change genre almost as often as location. From the Scottish highlights through to humid Jakarta; from biting social satire through to science fiction. It should come as […]
Known for novels such as Santa Evita and The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón) and winner of awards such as the 2003 Rodolfo Walsh Award for his career in journalism, and the 2002 Alfaguara Prize with El vuelo de la Reina (‘The Flight of the Queen’), Tomás Eloy Martínez was also one of eighteen […]
The easy choice would be to jump right in and ask novelist Nadeem Aslam what his thoughts are on the recent bombings in London. After all, his critically acclaimed novel Maps for Lost Lovers was a lyrical examination of the very immigrant communities in the North of England from which the alleged bombers came. British […]
