Pimp: The Story of My Life ~ by Iceberg Slim

Following yesterday’s interview with Jamie Byng, Jay Benedict takes a detailed look at Pimp: The Story of My Life, recently republished by Canongate. Unsurprisingly, in view of its subject, the review contains some fairly graphic language and imagery in places. —o— The first hurdle to get over with this book is the God awful cover. [...]

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Interview with Canongate – Publisher of the Year. Lisa Glass talks to Jamie Byng.

NEWSFLASH. INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE BYNG Vulpes Libris is relaunching its popular Publisher Interview features. To start us off with a bang and some spectacular virtual fireworks, we’re thrilled to bring you an interview with Canongate’s Jamie Byng. Canongate have just been named Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards. So, setting myself up [...]

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Who Owns Antiquity? by James Cuno

Who does art belong to? That is the question James Cuno attempts to answer. And not just regular art, either, but very old art from ancient civilizations. Not to mention pottery, wall murals, textiles and parts of buildings. Does it belong to the nation or to the world? Using the Elgin Marbles from the Athens [...]

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Coming up on Vulpes Week 8th June

A varied week sees Vulpes ready to pounce on a whole host of topics: from pimps and great lovers (hmmm) to Who Owns Antiquity – to Kirsty pouncing and wrestling  with the fascinating subject of song lyrics – in her exploration of how words works in relation to music. It has been a while since [...]

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The Ebooks are coming …

So it seems, but is this just another false dawn? Digitised books have been around from the very early days of the World Wide Web – I think Project Gutenberg must have been among the first sites I ever found on the Internet, in the 1990s. What a wonderful resource that was, and still is, [...]

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Repeat After Me by Rachel DeWoskin

Aysha Silvermintz is an OCD, lithium-taking, twenty-something New Yorker teaching English to immigrants when she meets and falls in love with her student. The student in question is Da Ge (pronounced dah guh), a handsome young Chinese dissident who narrowly escaped the horrors of the Tiananmen Square massacre (the twentieth anniversary of which fell yesterday [...]

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False Colors by Alex Beecroft

It’s 1762. For his first command, John Cavendish is given a ship and a crew both in need of repair. Determined to make a success of his mission to stop the slave trade in Algiers, he hopes Lieutenant Alfie Donwell will prove a valuable asset. Alfie however knows the mission is futile, but keeps a [...]

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Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to discover this remarkable little book, given my penchant for all things Southern Gothic, but I’m incredibly pleased that I finally did and I’d recommend it most heartily to anyone looking for that perfect summer read which still packs a bit of punch. Capote’s writing in [...]

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The Hours ~ by Michael Cunningham

Review by Sam Ruddock. Sam rejoins us with this companion piece to his excellent review last week of Mrs Dalloway. —o— If Mrs Dalloway were a diamond it would be almost as big as the Ritz, priceless, and kept under lock and key in a national museum. Visitors would gape at it, experts celebrate it, [...]

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The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

Not only is this a satisfying mystery, it’s also a look at the publishing world of the nineteenth century, which was very different than today’s. Mainly in that there was no international copyright laws, which sounds dull, but had great impact on authors. It mean that when an author’s work came to the US, it [...]

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