“If [the myth of Sisyphus] is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he grapples with whether–and if so, how–it’s possible to exist in a life that is without meaning. However, it’s in...

Of late it seems that I am being haunted by intertextuality. Each book that I pick up seems to slot into the vast Connect Four board of hermeneutics that is my reading life, and with everything I read, I find my to-read list growing ever broader and ever deeper. I seem to be at a stage in my reading where so many unknown unknowns are swiftly becoming known...

Over the course of my last few reviews I’ve been considering the role of the author as narrator and as character, and the degree to which authorial insertion is, to the mind of the reader, assumed to be inalienable. In large part this has been inspired by the narrator character–who is, perhaps, the author himself–in Milan Kundera’s The...

  When reading PG Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens recently I was struck by the narrator’s curiosity regarding “to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs.” These words resonated with me as they were the third time in as many books that I’d come across a similar sentiment; the other books...

Love Among the Chickens is my first foray into the work of Wodehouse; and as a fairly early work, it’s one of Wodehouse’s first forays into Wodehouse as well. A deliciously written farcical novel, it brings together the seemingly dissimilar worlds of writing and chicken farming—which prove to have a lot more in common than one might first imagine,...

  Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all… The story that I am asked to tell most often is how I met my husband, a story that is notable for the coincidence that it involves. We met, of course, in two different venues in a single night. Without exception, people seem to see this story as something involving...

Today’s guest post on the writing process is by SD Thorpe, whose book Getting Up is published through Momentum Books. The writing process. It goes like this. You get up early. You make a cup of tea. You sit down in front of the computer. Turn it on. Do NOT check Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr, Instagram or Ebay. Remember your dreams…write one down to...

In Susan Hill’s A Change for the Better Deirdre Fount finds herself traversing a path that is not the one she intended to venture down. Though she might have stumbled upon it of her own accord, her marathon trek along it is due to a mix of personal inertia and the pressures and expectations of others around her. This is how I’ve been feeling about...