"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."
~ Dr. Suess
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~ Anton Chekhov
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
~ Douglas Adams
The Bad Sex Award is probably not as prestigious as the Man Booker Prize, but it is definitely one of the most popular awards in the literary calender. Established by Auberon Waugh in 1993 ‘to highlight – and hopefully discourage – the “crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in […]
The Bookseller reported that the film rights to Lauren Beukes’ award winning novel, Zoo City have been sold to South African filmmaker, Helena Spring. Beukes said: “Every novelist dreams of a movie deal—but you actually want more than that. You want to find a producer of great vision and integrity and experience who fundamentally gets […]
Penguin Books South Africa and Little Brown in the UK graciously allowed us to publish the following article written by Paula McLain about fact vs fiction in her book, The Paris Wife, which explores the relationship between Ernest Hemmingway and Hadley Richardson. In Ernest Hemingway’s introduction to his memoir, ‘A Moveable Feast’, he writes, “If […]
Trolling the internet for interesting book news I have come across a disturbing trend in mainstream book review media. More and more the book reviewers seem to choose titles that are extremely highbrow and literary and in many cases inaccessible for most of the people on the street. The Guardian in the UK released a list […]
On 21 November 2011, Anne Inez McCaffrey passed away at her home in Ireland. The world of Fantasy will never be the same. Anne McCaffrey brought us the worlds of Pern, and the dragons that lived therein and an entire generation of readers will mourn her passing. io9.com had this to say: Anne McCaffrey wasn’t […]
Today, South African media is taking to the streets to protest the battering-ram speed of the Secrecy Bill being pushed through. In my heart, I want to believe that this will get stomped on by the Constitutional Court but it seems far too audacious to hope for that much right now. At the least, we can be […]
Briefly, The Absolutist is a story set mostly in the trenches of the First World War, alternatively narrated in present tense in the trenches and told in retrospective in Norwich in 1919. Tristan Sadler has letters to deliver to Marian, sister of his friend Will Bancroft. Will was shot as a traitor and a coward and Tristan […]
To follow up on our posts here and here about the National Book Awards, the winners have been announced! The official website of the National Book Foundation states that the 5 winners were chosen from a wide selection: In 2011, there were 1,223 books submitted for the National Book Awards. The number of books by […]
Jane Austen, despite being dead since 1817, continues to outsell many living authors. Six books and a handful of letters cemented her in the consciousness of the Western literary world, with Mr Darcy becoming the template upon which many a moody suitor has been based. Austen’s biting social satire was veiled in wit and setting, […]
As the world watches the growth of the Occupy movement and its often attendant V-masked protestors, it is a good time to look at and discuss the V for Vendetta graphic novel, and whether it is still relevant nearly thirty years after its publication. (There’s a fascinating article here in which David Lloyd discusses the […]
