Stewart's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 41-60 of 74).

It's nicer up close, where you can see the detail within the letters. Her other book has a cover like that, too.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom in the last year. This year’s longlist reflects the international scope of the prize and includes writers working in Hebrew, Afrikaans, Chinese and Arabic. Among the longlisted authors is Ismail Kadare, the inaugural Man Booker International Prize winner.


The titles lonnglisted are:

The Yacoubian Building, Alaa al Aswany (Humphrey Davies, Arabic, Fourth Estate)

Book of Words, Jenny Erpenbeck (Susan Bernofsky, German, Portobello Books)

The Moon Opera, Bi Feiyu (Howard Goldblatt, Chinese, Telegram Books)

Castorp, Pawel Huelle (Antonia Lloyd Jones, Polish, Serpent’s Tail)

Agamemnon’s Daughter, Ismail Kadare (David Bellos, French, Canongate)

Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua (Miriam Shlesinger, Hebrew, Atlantic Books)

Measuring The World, Daniel Kehlmann (Carol Brown Janeway, German, Quercus)

Gregorius, Bengt Ohlsson (Silvester Mazzarella, Swedish, Portobello Books)

Shutterspeed, Erwin Mortier (Ina Rilke, Dutch, Harvill Secker)

The Past, Alan Pauls (Nick Caistor, Spanish, Harvill Secker)

Rivers Of Babylon, Peter Pist’anek (Peter Petro, Slovak, Garnett Press)

Delirium, Laura Restrepo (Natasha Wimmer, Spanish, Harvill Secker)

The Model, Lars Saabye Christensen (Don Barlett, Norwegian, Arcadia Books)

Bahia Blues, Yasmina Traboulsi (Polly McLean, French, Arcadia Books)

The Way Of The Women, Marlene van Niekerk (Michiel do Heyns, Afrikaans, Little, Brown)

Omega Minor, Paul Verhaeghen (Paul Verhaeghen, Dutch, Dalkey Archive Press)

Montano, Enrique Vilas-Matas (Jonathan Dunne, Spanish, Harvill Secker)

The bracketed information includes translator, original language, and publisher respectively.

"I have grave misgivings about the preciousness of our defence of the freedom of novelists to be offensive about anything any anyone to the point where we here in the rich part of the world will turn deaf ears to all those in the poorer part of the world even when they're translators being assassinated by lunatics or idiots being shot by their own thuggish police."

It's times like this when the old Stephen Fry quote has to get wheeled out to say, "So you're offended. So fucking what?"

Free speech will never exist if you tell people what they can and can't say, what they can and can't do, and what they can and can't write.

Absolutely not.

"every time I walk into a bookstore I have to buy a book."

Only one? Pah! I must be in the advanced stages of OCD.

Tom, I put a copy of the list here.

Adam, Because even though I'm not reading through the list consecutively it's still good to drop in and pick up recommendations from the list and to share experiences with those on it.

What's really needed is a decent set of tags so that people can link to a page for a book or author, like others would do on a general forum or, with artists and whatnot on last.fm.

I get slightly miffed when reading a post and I see an author getting mentioned, yet nobody puts a link to the author (or book's) page.

Something like this is what I mean:

[author]Stephen King[/author]
[book]The Shining[/book]

So, if I were to be making an example post about an author such as [author]Stephen King[/author] then I would use the custom tags so I could link to one of his books, such as [book]The Shining[/book] and the page, once back from being processed by the server, would convert the tags into an actual link to the author or book in question.

Google would have a field day with all the interconnecting links, people may be inspired to check out new authors/books when they are only a link away, rather than having to copy and paste their names into a search box.

You may also like to look into Patrick McGrath. His novels aren't horror per se but the gothic tone set against the 20th Century works wonders, and just because it isn't horror (i.e. the genre) doesn't stop it from having its horrific moments.

Loads of time. But that's because I'm in no hurry to read all 1,001. I'd like to do it, but I don't see it as being any sort of achievement, especially given some of the crap in there.

Mine was to buy no more books until I had read a considerable number of the 200-odd sitting unread on the shelves. By day three I had broken down and had seven new books.

Out of the way thus far is Piercing by Ryu Murakami.

Intended for reading over the next few weeks:

The Pilgrim Hawk, Glenway Wescott
Fatelessness, Imre Kertesz
In The Wake, Per Petterson
The Grass Is Singing, Doris Lessing
The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk
The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike
Gentlemen, Klas Ostergren
Wings, Mikhail Kuzmin
Alphabet Of The Night, Jean Euphele-Milce
To A God Unknown, John Steinbeck

All them if I get lucky, which I doubt.

I came up with my plan two days ago. I decided to announce on my blog that I was going to review all 1,001 titles - now I have to, in order to save face.

Salma, you may appreciate 'House Of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's a big bulky book that is tricksy, clever, fun, and more. Intially it's about a house that is just a bit bigger on the inside than it is on the outside - and then, strangely, it seems to get bigger. No hacking of limbs and spurting blood.

"I kind of enjoy in a bibliophilic-masochistic way when books don't have happy endings"

Natalie, if you haven't already done so, read Richard Yates.

Agree with Kate, but it's still crap. Oh, and "Is Paul Auster a jerk" - well, yes. :)

Books by Saul Bellow. He constantly garners widespread praise - from critics, from other writers, etc. - and yet I can't get anything out of the attempts I've made at his books. (Usually no more than a few pages, anyway, given how dull I find him.) All that praise surely points to the fact that I'm out of step - I'd love to know what it is I need to click in order to begin to understand how to appreciate.

Absolute rubbish, as I recall it. The thing I remember around the time it came out was that people were praising how Mark Haddon had done remarkably well to achieve the voice of a child with Asperger, as if they knew what the internal voice of such a person was. And so the praise went anyway, until the release of his first adult novel, A Spot Of Bother, where it became obvious that he wasn't simplifying his style to achieve a literary voice, but that it was the best he can do.

I read 'A Prayer For Owen Meany' in January 2006 and I remember really loving it. But I've never felt the need to go seeking out more of Irving's work. I'd like to read 'A Prayer For Owen Meany' again, to see if it really was as good as I remember and because I want to review it, something I never did at the time.

1. The author. I have authors I like and will read. That's not to say I'll always read them. I used to read King, Herbert, Laymon almost religiously as a teen but I can't really read them now. So I move on, always keeping up to date (if they are still alive) with my favourite authors.

2. Peer reviews. I trust friends and online recommendations over those of Amazon reviewers. But I don't mean just someone saying something in passing, it's got to be a considered review; knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

3. Browsing. I like nothing better than to spend an hour or so just wandering from A to Z in Waterstones, Borders, etc. I'll pick up new names, read a bit, and decide.

4. eBay. I scroll through the Literary Fiction section of eBay looking for book. Sometimes, if it's in good condition, I'll buy something I've never heard of. It has surprising results.

5. Penguins. I have a bit of a fetish of Penguin Modern Classics and Penguin Classics. Seeing a black or silver cover has me wanting the book before even reading the blurb. I trust Penguin. I also trust a number of small presses (Pushkin, Marion Boyars, Peter Owen) and will throw myself into any Modern Classics collections they may publish.

6. Wikipedia. I'll sometimes pick a country and head to Wikipedia. It usually has a section of writers from that country. I'll look into them and if any of their works are available, I'll maybe buy it.

7. Subject Matter. Appliable only to non-fiction. But if there's a topic I'm interested in reading about, this usually swings it.

8. Hype. Let's face it, we do it. Although it's generally a let down.

Strong writing. What more is there to want?