Why small presses don’t get many books reviewed Today I am not happy. I have the comet’s tail end of a migraine, complete with weird black floaters and the sense that if I didn’t have my wonderful medication, I would also have pain. A world of pain. On Friday I had the full-blown, shutters-down start […]
Book review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog One of the issues I end up debating quite a lot with other writers, and with readers too, is whether it’s better to read an ambitious book that’s flawed, or a flawless book that’s pedestrian in scope. And of course the question, in part, depends on your definition […]
Sooo… the things I wanted to talk about: Jim Murdoch’s new novel, Stranger than Fiction. I really enjoyed this, and Jim’s profoundly idiosyncratic view of the world is always fascinating. I tried to come up with one of those pithy one-liners that you are supposed to use to encapsulate a project for the movie industry […]
“The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated” But not utterly exaggerated … Yes I have been absent on more dramatic terms this time. Two hospital interludes: the second one planned, the first an impromptu response to something (virus? bacterium? body attacking itself out of sheer boredom?) that left me so weak I was […]
This week I’m interviewing Michael Kimball as part of his blog tour for Dear Everybody, a novel with a fascinating structure. I’m not actually going to talk much about the novel, because Michael’s answers to my questions illuminate so much of the work, and the way that he created it, that I don’t think you […]
The downside of marketing yourself Just to prove that I’m being honest about the experience of ‘marketing’, the past week has actually slapped me with a whole messy handful of dilemmas that arise for many writers once they start being ‘known’. 1 – a writer I’ve never met, whose work I’ve never read, asked me […]
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