This Space

For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.             Amina Cain When TS Eliot read Dante for the first time, he noted a discrepan...

In order of being read. Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned… One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at ...

"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem" said Muriel Spark, adding by ...

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici   Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a...

On this day in 2004 , I posted the first entry on this blog.  In recent years many posts have reflected on the past and present of literary...

"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times ' 100 Best Books of...

The centenary of Kafka's death was marked twelve years late. His diary records it in September 1912: This story, The Judgment, I wrote ...

For anyone interested (you there in the phone box), here's a PDF of the 39 Books series. 39 Books: PDF As the introduction explained, t...