Mark A. Heberle reviews Minae Mizumura's The Fall of English, which looks at how English dominates not only science and the internet, but also publishing, and what this means for other languages, especially Japanese. To quote from the article: "This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when …
Continue reading Minae Mizumura on the Hegemony of English: from The Claremont Review of Books
Published by Viking / Penguin / Riverhead, 2005, 272 pages. New Year’s Eve, London, Toppers’ Block, named for the number of people who commit suicide by jumping off the roof. Martin, a disgraced TV presenter, has decided to end his life. He is ready for the job—he has brought a stepladder and wire cutters to …
A wonderful piece by George Saunders on writing. Saunders is a short story writer, and his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, has just been published. He writes about how the idea for the book came to him, and what it takes to move from an idea to a finely honed piece of writing. "A …
Continue reading What writers really do when they write: George Saunders (from The Guardian)
Published by Pan / Penguin, 2005, 512 pages. When I mentioned to a friend that I enjoyed Susanna Gregory’s medieval whodunits, she lent me the entire series of novels set during the time of Henry VIII with a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, as the main character. Having just finished the first one (although strictly speaking, …
Adam Kirsch New York Times, 17 January 2017 Adam Kirsch on the problematic relationship between truth and lies in writing. "Reality is the ingredient that turns a bad fiction into an enthralling one. "This dynamic is part of the novel’s origins. The earliest English novels, from 'Moll Flanders' (1722) to 'Clarissa' (1748), were published anonymously, …
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2016, 528 pages. It was in the early 80s that I first heard Bruce Springsteen. Looking for new music, I raided the tiny music shop in Secunderabad (India) and picked up Born to Run. I was hooked. The music spoke to me, although I was from a different culture and …
Translated from Russian by Keith GessenPublished by Picador / Dalkey Archive Press, 2005, 240 pages. Original version published in 1997. "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." On 26 April 1986, Energy Block No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was …
Continue reading Voices from Chernobyl—The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich
Published by John Murray, 2015, 384 pages. An intruder breaks into Maureen Phelan’s apartment. Without thinking, she brains him with a Holy Stone, a religious relic. Worrying over the dead body and the blood seeping into the grout on the kitchen floor, she calls her son James, a gangster, to deal with the mess. James …
Published by Sphere, 2016, 352 pages. So you thought we’d come to the end of the Harry Potter story…well, think again. JK Rowling, with some help this time, has written another instalment. This one takes place 19 years after the events of the last Potter book, and the plot revolves around Harry’s second son, Albus …
Continue reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—JK Rowling, John Thorne and John Tiffany
Published by Wordcraft of Oregon, 2007, 192 pages. The title of this book is borrowed from a story by Balzac about betrayal and mistrust, two threads running through the book. The third is love, with all its inadequacies and flaws. Fred Twomey is a creative writing professor, married with two sons. He has a reasonably …
