Posted in Entries by Lisa, Fiction: literary, tagged Ortolans, Senseless, Stona Fitch, Two Ravens Press on July 23, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Adapted from my review on the TRP blog. I feel slightly strange reviewing a novel by one of my Two Ravens Press stablemates, but here goes…
Senseless by Stona Fitch is a literary thriller originally released in the U.S. just days after the September 11th terrorist attacks. The main character is Eliott Gast, an American economist [...]
Posted in Entries by Mary, Fiction in translation, Fiction: literary, tagged absurdism, existentialism, French literature, meaning in life, Nobel prize for literature on July 20, 2008 | 12 Comments »
I nervously decided to review The Stranger for our French week - nervously because I’m not sure what I have, if anything, to contribute to the thousands of pages of analysis that have been written about this slim, 185-page book, considered by many to be one of the most influential, powerful novels of the 20th [...]
Posted in Entries by Leena, Fiction in translation, Fiction: literary, tagged French literature, Marguerite Duras on July 19, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Duras’ Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein was one of the first books I ever blogged about, and not much seems to have changed since then…
For a writer I enjoy, Duras is one I understand surprisingly little, and the things I know about her can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Firstly, I know [...]
Posted in Entries by Emma, Fiction: children's, Fiction: general, Fiction: historical, Fiction: literary, Fiction: young adult, Uncategorized, tagged Emma Darwin, Antonia Forest, children's fiction, young adult fiction on July 10, 2008 | 22 Comments »
Perhaps it was inevitable that Antonia Forest should go out of fashion for a while. When you were born in 1915, put life on hold for war work, have your first novel published in 1948, and take the rest of a long life to write eight books about the same family, two books about their [...]
Posted in Fiction: literary, Thursday Soapbox, tagged Alex Pheby, difficult books, Eleanor Grosch, literary fiction, PushMePullYouDesign on July 3, 2008 | 41 Comments »
There is inherent in difficulty as it pertains to the writing of fiction, something alienating. In non-fiction the writer has the luxury of retreating behind the complexity of their subject. It is permissible for them to say that their material requires a lexical density and conceptual intricacy that militates against accessibility.
You can’t do that in [...]
Posted in Entries by Emily, Fiction: 19th century, Fiction: literary, Fiction: young adult, tagged feminism, teen, Miles Franklin, Australian literature on June 25, 2008 | 9 Comments »
When I emigrated to Australia in May of this year, among the mixed feelings I had about leaving home was a sense of excitement about discovering new authors and an alternative literary history to the one I’d been raised on. Of course, I could already count at least three Australian authors as favourites (Peter Carey, [...]
Posted in Entries by Rosy, Fiction: literary, tagged Peter Hoeg, Borderliners, Danish literature on June 17, 2008 | 14 Comments »
Peter Høeg is a bestselling Danish writer who achieved great acclaim in the 1990s with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a philosophical thriller which broke through to become an international bestseller and subsequently made into a film with Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne.
Of Høeg’s 6 published novels, not one of them is in a similar [...]
Posted in Entries by Lisa, Fiction: literary, tagged Lisa Glass, Vanessa and Virginia, Susan Sellers, Virginia Woolf on June 14, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Vanessa and Virginia is a first for me. I’ve never before reviewed a book written by one of my TRP stable-mates and, as those of you who read the Two Ravens Press blog will know, I was ambivalent at the idea. Once I finished the novel I could not resist reviewing it - I was [...]
Posted in Entries by Leena, Fiction: literary on June 8, 2008 | 9 Comments »
I’m a big fan of Alice Thompson’s writing, so I was excited by the release of The Falconer earlier this year. Her novels are always small but perfectly formed… and mind-bendingly surreal. Justine is a tale of sexual obsession, Pharos a ghost story - Pandora’s Box I have yet to read - and The Falconer is [...]
Posted in Entries by Emma, Fiction: literary, Non-fiction: essays, Thursday Soapbox, tagged A Secret Alchemy, Add new tag, commercial fiction, Emma Darwin, Francis Spufford, genre fiction, Gilead, literary fiction, literary snobbery, Marilynn Robinson, The Mathematics of Love, Thursday Soapbox on June 5, 2008 | 52 Comments »
As a counterpoint to Clare Sudbery’s piece last week “In Praise of Popular Culture”, on the Soapbox this week we have the author of “The Mathematics of Love” and soon-to-be-released “A Secret Alchemy”, Bookfox Emma Darwin, putting the case for literary fiction.
Truffling Out the Riches by Emma Darwin
So, which way up is your literary snobbery? [...]
