Coming Up on Vulpes This Week – From 1st Sept

We’re back: cool, calm and collected, with a nice all over tan and a cocktail in paw. Well, some of us anyway. Some of us are still feeling rather frazzled and hectic. Holidays, after all, along with moving house and Christmas, are supposed to be some of the most stressful experiences we go through. (According [...]

Read Full Post »

Foxtrotting off for the Summer.

So, it is summer (although looking outside my window at the torrential rain this morning, you wouldn’t know it) and the Vulpes crew have packed their bags and are off on holiday. For two whole weeks. That’s right: TWO WHOLE WEEKS.  Since October 2007 the site has been posting nearly every day so we figure [...]

Read Full Post »

Suhayl Saadi on erotic fiction

Guest article by author Suhayl Saadi: ‘In the Garden of Earthly Delights.’ This is the erotic tale of Melanie and the snake. In the early 1990s, when I began to write fiction charting the confluence between realism and mysticism, I’d been reading widely for a number of years and had joined a writers’ group, but [...]

Read Full Post »

The art of being dead, by Stephen Clayton

We were becoming drunk, wonderfully, seriously drunk. No plan had been entered into, there was no particular cause for celebration nor was any reason thought necessary for our behaviour: only the excitement and unpredictability of the moment. It was early evening but the pub was already busy. The jukebox was playing, people were talking far [...]

Read Full Post »

Summertime ~ by J M Coetzee

Review by Sam Ruddock 31 May 1975 South Africa is not formally in a state of war, but it might as well be.  As resistance has grown, the rule of law has step by step been suspended.  The police and the people who run the police (as hunters run packs of dogs) are by now [...]

Read Full Post »

Interview with Trevor Byrne, author of Ghosts and Lightning

Welcome to Trevor Byrne, author of the superb new novel, Ghosts and Lightning (which I reviewed here). It’s been a while since I had a ‘book crush’ – the first was (of course) The Lord of the Rings, and more recently there was Laura Dave‘s London is the best city in America. Ghosts and Lightning [...]

Read Full Post »

Andrei Makine’s Human Love: Browbeaten by politics and terrified by cheese …

As a child, Elias Almeida loses both his parents during the uprisings against colonial rule in Angola and the Congo. As an adult and a professional revolutionary, he bears witness to mankind at its pitiless worst. Yet he continues to believe in a better world and the redeeming power of love – even though he [...]

Read Full Post »

Dancing With Cuba, by Alma Guillermoprieto: A one person two hander

Exhaustive, encyclopaedic, always full of fascinating figures and dates… Fidel was marvellous when he gave himself over to speech, I thought.  And there was no limit to his generosity.  He sent off fifteen of the country’s doctors, fifteen nurses and ten sanitation workers to help the Peruvians.  I studied his beautiful manly profile on the [...]

Read Full Post »

The Miracle by Michael Schuman

These days, in America, “outsourcing” is a dirty word. We blame it for everything from the loss of jobs to confusing assembly instructions on a book case. “How did this happen?” we ask. That was my question when I picked up this book, subtitled The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth. Not only is [...]

Read Full Post »

Coming up on Vulpes Libris – a busy week before a site break

Ghosts, Asia, erotic fiction, love, death, Fidel, Dublin, Coetzee…we have it all on Vulpes Libris this week. Monday 10 – Jackie counts on Michael Schuman’s The Miracle, a timely look at Asia’s quest for wealth. Tuesday 11 – Kirsty (rather exasperatedly) considers the role of Fidel Castro in Alma Guillermoprieto´s Dancing with Cuba. Warning: disturbing [...]

Read Full Post »