If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!     On Monday I popped along to the Wheeler Centre to see Barcelona-born, LA-based author Carlos Ruiz Zafón in conversation with local writer and broadcaster Sian Prior. As usual, I went bearing pen and...

“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...

  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...