My friend Gray Kane (@graykane), has recently released his novel Controlled Accident on an unsuspecting public through smashwords and kindle. He asked me to review it. Here it goes: Controlled Accident is positioned as a game of chess played between a larger-than-life performance con artist named Jack and a savvy proto-emo kid named Louis. The [...]

If you are an aging laureate poet, there are several ways to take a vow before that good night: You can whine in evident rhymes against the dying of the light à la Philip Larkin, carry prose to your deathbed as Neruda, or do as Derek Walcott does and reign and ride your horse, stately [...]

Mettant en forme le passage d’une oraliture à la littérature, Solibo Magnifique, l’un des premiers romans de Patrick Chamoiseau, narre le meurtre du raconteur paradigmatique, le personnage éponyme tué par la parole, et nous lance à la poursuite de son assassin. Bien vite une question s’impose : comment peut-on mourir « égorgé par la parole [...]

Toda esa luz está muerta —dijo Ingeborg—. Toda esa luz fue emitida hace miles y millones de años. Es el pasado, ¿lo entiendes? Cuando la luz de esas estrellas fue emitida nosotros no existíamos, ni existía vida en la tierra, ni siquiera la tierra existía. Esa luz fue emitida hace mucho tiempo ¿lo entiendes?, es [...]

Así se escribe, sí señor. Y muchas preguntas después. Respondamos algunas. ¿Por qué tres tristes tigres? Porque son tres amigos que andan por ahí melancólicos y apolíticos, llorando la extinción de su mundo de arrimados al detritus cultural. Porque es un trabalenguas y la novela traba las lenguas de daiquirís y manías verbales, que mira [...]

I’m obviously still a sucker for a moving finale. In the case of this novel I was a sucker for the whole thing. Written in very simple prose, almost as if the book was a series of screenshots, the story has time to develop through an A, B, C and then F plot that I [...]

Try squeezing 30 years of your life into 3 pages, and maybe then you will understand what 3000 years of Chinese history feels like on 300 pages. Somehow though, J.A.G. Roberts pulls it off. The book never leaves you feeling like this or that period was shortchanged. On the contrary, you leave the reading well [...]

Amazing that Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in 1917 and held on through the short century with his credentials intact, is still kicking hard. This little book I assigned to my undergrad students as an introduction to current affairs from the panoramic point of view. Only ninety pages long, but it manages to sound deeply [...]

The history of this novel is as rife with injustice as its contents. Having been famous for not having been read by anyone, the novel is probably not even a novel. The ‘thing’ is very episodic, with only a few reoccurring characters whose lives don’t really amount to a plot. If there is a main character here it would [...]