Coming up next week on Vulpes …

..
As befits a literary blog, there’s a distinctly writerly caste to this week’s offerings, with three reviews of books by or about literary giants – Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Truman Capote –  and two of books by less stellar, but no less fascinating writers.
Oh – and we also have a Fox getting to grips [...]

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Apologies…

I’m really sorry that due to circumstances beyond my control I am unable to bring you the review of If I Stay which is postponed to a later date.  However, in the spirit of the new VL tradition I have written my very first (and perhaps only!) Haiku Review.
You can find more Haiku reviews [...]

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Mrs Dalloway ~ by Virginia Woolf

Guest review by Sam Ruddock.
Sam very kindly came to our rescue a little while ago when he agreed to let us reprint a review from his own blog, Books, Time and Silence in order to fill a last minute gap in our schedule.  We liked his writing so much that we asked him to come [...]

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Kill-Grief by Caroline Rance

From the very first sentence, this book wraps you round in a coat of darkness, tension, low-life street horror and kick-ass descriptive poetry strong enough to obliterate several countries and still have time for a gin or two.
I loved it.
After all, any first page in a novel that has this paragraph in it gets my [...]

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Fighting It by Regi Claire + Giveaway

Vulpes Libris regulars might remember that Regi Claire recently wrote us a moving Soapbox article about the effects of illness on creativity.
In her collection of short stories, Fighting It, as the title suggests, each of the protagonists is fighting against something in their lives. That ’something’ might be cancer, an unkind spouse, adulterous impulses or [...]

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A One Minute Review: The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, by Kenneth Blanchard, William Oncken, Jr., and Hal Burrows

The One Minute Manager said that I was by no means alone in what I was doing.  In fact, he implied it was almost becoming a disease in our country.  He even had contemplated starting an organisation called “Rescuers Anonymous” for people who were compulsive monkey-picker-uppers.  It would be a gathering of “do-gooders” – very [...]

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Almost Heaven by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles

Part of VL’s celebration of The International Year of Astronomy
Subtitled The History of Women in Space, this book is both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating, because we get a lot of behind the scenes info on the space programs and frustrating, due to the slow progress of women’s participation in them.
Not only does it provide [...]

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Coming Up on Vulpes Libris & Haiku Review

Haiku review?
Let me explain.
In our quest to liven things up around here, and inject a bit of fun, short, silly stuff, we are going to run a series of haiku reviews.
Our founder, Leena, suggested the idea and here are the first of them:
PATHOLOGIES OF POWER by Paul Farmer.
Whether in Congo,
Or Cuba, take my advice:
Don’t [...]

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Poetry Week: John Donne, The Reformed Soul

I studied the poetry of John Donne for A Level, and loved it: how could a seventeen year old not love a poet who writes about sex as Heaven and Hell, and berates and begs his God with the fury of a lover? Who argues his girl into bed, and talks his way into his deity’s heart, [...]

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Poetry Week: Nothing to gain but my chains …

Austin Clarke, with Louis MacNeice, was one of the two great figures of twentieth century Irish poetry immediately after Yeats. His life touched, tangentially at times, the development of Ireland and its culture until his death in 1974. He is not as well-known as he should be but can be seen as the first in [...]

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