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ReadySteadyBlog

TEV: "One of the UK's best and brightest book bloggers"

Friday 15 May 2009

Wee weekly round-up

Before I rest up for the weekend, a coupla things to draw your attention to:


  • Steve provides us with "a selection that might be called The Best of This Space"
  • The Armies by Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (as you know, I was judge, and I'm still scratching my head as to how come Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 wasn't even shortlisted!)
  • interviews over on The Book Depository site with historian Andy Beckett ("The British 70s are full of political surprisess if you make yourself look at them with fresh eyes... the Labour vote in the 1979 election actually went up, especially among wealthier voters -- the idea that the behaviour of the unions sent the electorate running screaming away from Labour is a myth...") and Thomas Traherne expert Denise Inge ("Readers with imagination fall for Traherne. He takes you on unexpected interior journeys into desire and lack, infinity, time and eternity. Reading him isn't always easy since the language of his day is so different from ours and his world view sometimes challenges the assumptions of our time, but he will thrill, surprise and exhaust you...")
  • a brief interview with Béla Tarr
  • trailer for new Godard film Socialisme

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: , , , , ,

Reader Comments

Friday 15 May 2009

Lara Pawson says...

We went to the Tate. It was a very good evening. I was there with Bernardine Evaristo, whose superb writing got her longlisted on the Orange prize this year. (Blonde Roots for those of you who don't know). There was masses of champagne - as my head learned today with regret - and a free book too! But, more seriously, Boyd Tonkin gave a very thoughtful speech packed with integrity, as did Anne Mclean who was up as translator for two books. And it was a real shame you weren't there because I wasn't the only person looking forward to meeting you! Someone said something about your shoulder and I wondered how that small white fluffy dog could do such a thing...

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Serendipoetry

Canticle

Sometimes when you walk down to the red gate
hearing the scrape-music of your shoes across gravel,
a yellow moon will lift over the hill;
you swing the gate shut and lean on the topmost bar
as if something has been accomplished in the world;
a night wind mistles through the poplar leaves
and all the noise of the universe stills
to an oboe hum, the given note of a perfect
music; there is a vast sky wholly dedicated
to the stars and you know, with certainty,
that all the dead are out, up there, in one
holiday flotilla, and that they celebrate
the fact of a red gate and a yellow moon
that tunes their instruments with you to the symphony.

-- John F. Deane

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decolletage

A low neckline on a woman's dress. more …

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