Okay, On The Beach is a nice elegaic title for it, but why? There is barely any beach action at all. The point of Shute’s novel is that there is no action full stop, just three hundred pages of post nuclear war fatalism. Emotional speculative f[…]

Amateur theatre is an effervescent affair, where teachers, professors and investment bankers gather and express. Here are found mannish giants tottering in maid’s outfits and septa-centarian biblical boat-keepers confessing to divine misrepres[…]

Jorge Luis Borges
I meant to publish this a while back. Reading the article on FT this month regarding Latin American literature jogged my memory.
Borges is Argentina’s greatest modern writer. That’s hardly a contentious statement. I woul[…]

I believe The Tin Can Tree was the last of Anne Tyler’s novels that I had not read, until she releases a new one. My reading of her novels follows my usual arc for authors that I really like. Upon discovery, I devour all her books I can find i[…]

The Feast Of The Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
(I need to add a note that I wrote this before seeing Mark’s item on Lincoln and Burr below – I’ve read both and should really have thought to mention them in this.)
This is a compelling a[…]

TS: Fact vs Fiction
‘The celebrated East Room was still unfinished, although Jefferson had recently used it to give shelter to the largest cheese ever made in the United States. This odoriferous miracle of American inventiveness most appropriat[…]

Yeah yeah who’s the clown here exactly?
Surely the only acceptable time-specific hoax left would be for every media outlet to run EXACTLY the stories they would have run anyway!
(Like y’know DO YOU SEE!?)[…]

Andrew Rilstone on Cerebus 300: This is superb (and no, you don’t have to have been reading the comic to appreciate it – I haven’t been! – though knowing who/what Cerebus and Dave Sim are would help). It’s so good that I[…]

Andrew Vachss – Safe House
One of the things I like about Richard Stark’s Parker novels is the sense of a man taking care, an expert in his craft; also the sense of a world more or less coexisting with the one I know of which I am complet[…]

Zaha Hadid Rules !
The thing with Zaha Hadid is that she does not do much theory, or the theory she does is a bout buildings and not cities. Her buildings are about the logical extensions of material and form–so radical in many ways that she is[…]