Next Week on Vulpes Libris: Short Stories

Next week will be something of a short story theme week on Vulpes, with some old favourites, some twentieth-century classics, something brand new, and a guest piece from Tania Hershman, short story buff extraordinaire.
MONDAY: We kick off the Short Story Week with a round-up of favourite short stories and short story collections from a few of [...]

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Sue Moorcroft: Uphill All the Way

Sometimes it happens that a book may speak to you but you can’t speak about the book. It has happened to me a couple of times, with books I loved and was particularly keen to write about: there was Stupid and Contagious by Caprice Crane, which I adored, but no matter how hard I tried my [...]

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Amélie Nothomb: Sulphuric Acid & The Life of Hunger

Amélie Nothomb’s Antichrista was one of the first books I blogged about, and since then I’ve been a devotee to Nothomb’s mixture of elegance, absurdity, and pungency. It’s funny, though, that although I adore her writing, something about it usually leaves me unsatisfied. It isn’t just that the novels are short: there always seems to be [...]

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The Idea of Perfection, by Kate Grenville

It’s very tempting not to summarise the book at all, because there’s no way a summary could do this gem any justice. It is a story about some fairly low-key romances that happen in an obscure, oppressively hot, mostly barren part of the world – doesn’t sound very good so far, does it? But somehow [...]

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Special Report from the Frontline of the Edinburgh Book Festival

This really is a piece of two halves. Eve, our teenlit correspondent, reports on a variety of events involving writers for teenagers and the issues surrounding teen fiction. Whilst I attended a number of events, but decided that the ones I really wanted to cover, the ones I thought most important to cover, were [...]

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Interview with Janet Todd

Janet Todd is the author (among many other books) of Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle – one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, and which I raved about here – as well as the general editor of the new Cambridge editions of Jane Austen, and, as of next [...]

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Foul Play : What’s Wrong with Sport by Joe Humphreys

I picked up this book because I thought it would tell me something I wanted to hear: that sport is a Bad Thing. The reason why I wanted to believe this is that soccer in particular has always annoyed me: the obsession of fans with their teams and the tolerance of society for that obsession, [...]

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Drives Like a Dream by Porter Shreve

Lydia is a 61 yr. old author of books on automotive history. We meet her on the weekend that her ex-husband, Cy, is marrying a much younger woman. Their 3 adult children have returned to Detroit for the wedding. Lydia isn’t one of those bitter, man-hating divorcees, but an intelligent, active woman full of plans [...]

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Next Week on Vulpes

This coming week the foxes will be reviewing contemporary fiction from three different continents, looking at the state of modern sports, talking to Dr Janet Todd about Fanny Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and historical fiction, and last but not least, reporting from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Schedule as follows:
Monday: Jackie revs up Drives Like a Dream by [...]

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Richard III Week: Interview with Annette Carson

To close Richard III week, Vulpes Libris talks to Annette Carson, author of “Richard III: The Maligned King”, a recently-published reassessment of the enigmatic ‘Last Plantagenet’. (Reviewed here ).
VL: Welcome to Vulpes Libris, Annette – and thank you for joining us. I’ve been casting an eye over your CV and the first [...]

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