Blogs about Books and literature

Iain Crichton Smith is best remembered now as a poet, but he published a dozen novels over the space of 25 years, starting with Consider the Lillies (1968), a now-classic tale of the Clearances of …

"Ulster, Gaza, Vietnam/were anthems beyond all words:/the world played tunes unknown/to us. We all stopped singing."

Please check out the 39 Books series on my blog.

John Gould (1804-1881) holds an important place in the history of ornithology and natural history illustration. He was a pioneering naturalist who collaborated with Charles Darwin, a taxonomist, publisher, and collector. His magnificent folio works, …

Today's links You were promised a jetpack by liars: AIs and self-driving cars are the new jetpacks. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where …

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various …

Pam was born in 1952 and has lived in Sheffield for 51 years. She was a teacher. Reading has always been extremely important to me, although I cannot remember how I got started or recall …

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Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a remarkable book in several senses. The first is it's scope, by which I don't just mean the breadth of US history from 1492 to …

Edited and annotated by Robert Chandler Review by Karen Langley The last decade or so has seen a resurgence of interest in Russian émigré writing with a host of forgotten names resurfacing in sparkling new …

Spell the Month in Books is hosted by Reviews From the Stacks and occurs on the second Saturday of each month or maybe a bit later! Here is my May installment:The Murderer’s Daughters by Randy …

While distant reading has taught us a lot about the history of fiction, it hasn’t done much yet to explain why we keep turning pages. “Suspense” is the word we use to explain that impulse. …

I’ve been having a devil of a time figuring which version of the EU’s recently passed Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is the final one. So I wrote to the European Commission Library, figuring they …

Upon ascending the peristyle of the Louvre, one first glimpses the Venus de Milo, standing alone on her pedestal at the end of the large hall. It’s a moment of indefinable emotion, elusive and never …

Indie publishers Honford Star certainly haven’t been afraid to try something a little different with their list, and some of their recent Korean fiction, such as Bora Chung’s collections and Bae Myung-hoon’s speculative works, have …

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the beloved 1900 children’s novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. It is the first novel in the Oz series of books. A …

Reluctant to wait for the first translations of Mircea Cărtărescu’s latest novel to start coming out in the second half of 2024, I taught myself enough Romanian to read it in the original. This “pseudo-historical …

Blessed be those who see only light and feel nothing. When a one-megaton nuclear warhead detonates, every molecule of air within a one-mile radius instantly superheats to one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit. The …

This is the third of four posts on W.G. Sebald in Context, which came out last September from Cambridge University Press. It contains thirty-eight essays on Sebald by specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the …

“Tracing the history of the words frequently used to define and degrade women is a necessary step if we are to understand how gender oppression functions and reproduces itself,” writes Silvia Federici, in Witches, Witch-Hunting, …