literature-editor

Haruki Murakami is one of those writers who can be best described as an odd auld creature. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is hard to figure out why he has not yet been a winner - in lieu of the likes of recent…

It had never even occurred to Nathan that people his age read the newspapers. “You’re how old – fourteen, fifteen?” Mr Andrews asked that day in class, hands on his hips. CSPE was the ultimate doss class anyway; no one cared about the…

This classic twentieth century Irish novel has been rereleased in a special hardback edition by Lilliput Press in time for the sixtieth anniversary of its publication. The Ginger Man follows the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, an…

We’re all in this mess because Sharon called Mr Delaney a paedo. There she is, stretched out on a long wooden bench, the rest of us perched on the opposite pew like birds on a wire. Birds about to get electrocuted. Peter bites his nails –…

I was twelve when I finished reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It had taken me a year to the day and as soon I closed the cover on those adventures I cried like a five year old. I was distraught that there wasn’t more. Harry Potter had…

It’s really difficult to write or talk about Proust without coming across as a pretentious and irrelevant toolshed. ‘Proust scholar’ has become a pop culture shorthand for the most useless type of individual imaginable. Without even being…

I was scooping the guts out of a lamb when I heard Swinger Dingavan was dead. Maureen shouted across at Steve-o and he knocked off the power hose, the wool and blood circling around him. She said Swinger was found in his Golf with a…

When the idea for the Open Book series was suggested, I really didn’t have to do a lot of thinking about who my favourite author is. What some might find odd about my choice as a sci-fi reviewer, is that the author I picked is a relatively…

In as much as it’s possible to make such a statement, To Kill a Mockingbird is a perfect book; the rare modern literary classic that everyone has actually read. (If someone found an earlier, radically different draft of, say, Ulysses, it’s…

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, AKA Mark Twain, came into the world at the heels of Halley’s Comet in 1835 and left it the same way in 1910. In his own words, “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they…