Reading Vila-Matas' Montevideo, I realise it should be me giving out all the major book awards.

"Pretty well everything that I have read by western journalists which can be immediately checked – checkpoints, armed political gangs, climate of fear, shortages of food and goods – turns out to be an absolute lie. I did not know this before I came." www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/202...

@publisherswkly.bsky.social You refer to Judith Hermann's novel as a "deeply affecting English-language debut". This will be news to those who read translations of 'Alice' 15 years ago, not to speak of 'Summerhouse, Later', and 'Letti Park'. www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619510

Just arrived in the post. Translated by @shirtysleeves.bsky.social I doubt there is more of Bernhard left to translate.

This is a little bizarre. Dennis Cooper quotes the entirety of a blog post of mine from 2017. I've read one of his novels – The Sluts. Do any of you have an opinion on his work? denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on...

I've been locked out of my X account after the connected email was changed, and not by me. So I'll be here for the foreseeable. Probably good for the soul.

This is very entertaining. shows.acast.com/egs-podcast/...

Didn't finish Mac & His Problem, but still glad someone's still prepared to publish a translation. Yale UP in this case, oddly. yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...

Either someone, a group of people, or a bot from Singapore has been visiting multiple pages of my blog every day for weeks now. I hope they notice this link at some point. buymeacoffee.com/thisspace

An end of year post entitled 'End of year post'. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/12/end-...

"I think that Klaus is not speaking so much as parroting the senescent propaganda of Staatsräson, the version of history that floats undisturbed through the technocratic ventilation systems, a malevolent spirit seeking new host bodies." www.equator.org/articles/how...

Today in 2019 I posted a reading of Beckett's Stirrings Still. So, if you haven't listened to it before... this-space.blogspot.com/2019/12/all-...

Short post on a small book anniversary. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/12/this...

For Peter Handke's 83rd birthday. thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/w...

"Gabriel Josipovici at Eighty-Five" www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/gabr...

My partial response to Timothy Bewes' Free Indirect: The Novel in the Age of Postfiction. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

In the post today, the third volume of the new translation, this one by Peter Bush. And for under a tenner from Blackwell's.

"I cannot imagine a dinner party that would not be improved by violence." For dinner party, read book club. oldoldoldoldnew.substack.com/p/cioran-xv

"The crisis for the novel in our time is that there is no crisis." this-space.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

"Lightness and humor are qualities I hold in very high regard. The artists of the last century who most excite me—Stravinsky, Picasso, Klee, Eliot, Proust, Kafka—all possess them." www.liberation.fr/culture/livr...

"Victory to Vietnamese" (sic) graffiti still visible on the line between Fratton and Portsmouth & Southsea stations.

New podcast from the European Graduate School featuring interviews with Christopher Fynsk and Avital Ronell. shows.acast.com/egs-podcast/...

Anyone in the UK or who has access to iPlayer, Bryan Magee's series from the 80s The Great Philosophers is being repeated tonight on BBC4. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

On Byung-Chul Han's The Crisis of Narration. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-...

Nearly 20 years ago Arcade books announced Richard Howard's translation of Cioran's Cahiers. There was even a cover. But it never appeared. Searching for news just now, I discovered this: dustyhope.com/bel/emil-cio...

Found this on a secondhand stall selling supermarket fiction.

Lars Iyer has a new website now that Typepad is closing down. larsiyer.co.uk

Over a year since it was published and this is only the second review. Very welcome nonetheless. bigother.com/2025/09/10/c...

How can we sleep? A post in response to reading @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social's translation of volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/09/read...

"In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession" this-space.blogspot.com/2025/08/read...

An interview with Rosalind Belben on the reissue of her 1979 novel Dreaming of Dead People. electricliterature.com/rosalind-bel...

Please help. Our department runs a groundbreaking part-time degree programme in English Literature and Community Engagement, known as ELCE, designed for mature students who didn't or couldn't do a degree at 18. The University of Bristol has decided to close it. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Imagine that we do not know what blindness is." Very impressive essay on Autism by Sinéad Murphy. brownstone.org/articles/wha...

Claude Monet looks like the van in Dumb & Dumber. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqHU...

I found this 1965 US paperback on a sweltering day in Portsmouth, June 1987, the day Thatcher's Tories were elected for the third time. The page edges are tinted dark pink.

Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben review – rivals anything by Virginia Woolf

On this day, 20 years since Jean Charles de Menezes was shot in the head by British police, I remember this entry to the TLS's 2008 Books of the Year. As these same marchers are arrested for publically opposing genocide, I wonder who is annihilating these "cosseted freedoms".

Out next month from And Other Stories. www.andotherstories.org/dreaming-of-...

A short post on three books I read and re-read this year.

Read the first line in a bookshop in Southsea in the Summer of 1989. One of those key moments in a reading life. The original title is Der Chinese des Schmerzes but Ralph Manheim's renaming is more appropriate.

"I'm one of these people who can't read Proust. I find it unbelievably boring, all the mopey kid stuff. You know, 'For fuck's sake, go and kick a ball around or something.'" newleftreview.org/sidecar/post... Being as polite as I can, I'm not keen on Geoff Dyer.

We shall fight on the polluted beaches. We shall fight on the deserted High Streets. We shall fight in the barren fields and in the food banks. We shall fight in the crowded waiting rooms. We shall never surrender our private equity consultancies.

Began to listen to a podcast about modernism. One of the presenters claims the 19thC novel is famous for its opening lines while "there's no great opening line of a modernist novel". podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

PN Review has a special edition on language, with eight essays free to read, including Gabriel Josipovici's The Myth of the Native Language: www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/the-...

The graphic artist has legged it.

This novel surprised me enough to prompt what I hestitate to call a review. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/06/on-c...

The Economist article is something to behold, and such a shame it is anonymous. Can anyone have a guess who wrote it? The tweet below doesn't include a link, so here it is: archive.ph/CP8rW

Rosalind Belben's great novel Dreaming of Dead People from 1979 is being reissued in August by And Other Stories. www.andotherstories.org/authors/rosa...

"I sought out writers who made a concern of writing, not out of some tedious self-involvement, but to attend to what writing did and where it took you." www.booksofsomesubstance.com/blog/tnabwmk...