Author Archives: Patrick Lennon

Fiction set in Belgium: a very brief overview

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

Reading Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) the other day – part of which is set in Brussels, where the protagonist arrives shortly after the teenager Joe van Holsbeeck was killed for his MP3 player in the city’s central train station … Continue reading →

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Invisible pictures (1): Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

There’s a review in the TLS this week of Don DeLillo’s 2011 collection of short stories The Angel Esmeralda (published in the UK by Picador). It’s surprising that the review should only be appearing now since the book was published … Continue reading →

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Richard Benson’s The Printed Picture

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

Published in 2008 by The Museum of Modern Art in New York to accompany the exhibition of the same title that ran there from October 2008 until July 2009, Richard Benson’s The Printed Picture provides a fascinating historical overview of … Continue reading →

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Don DeLillo at Yankee Stadium?

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

As the couples pour into the stadium in their thousands – the “bridegrooms in identical blue suits, the brides in lace-and-satin gowns” – , ‘Rodge’ and his wife Maureen, armed with a pair of binoculars, scan the crowd from their … Continue reading →

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English books and bookshops in Brussels

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

Browsing in a second-hand bookshop, you never know what you’re going to come across, and that’s one of the things I like about them. If you want to sell books or give some away, this is also the place to … Continue reading →

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Alain de Botton’s Kiss and Tell

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

There was a short piece in The Guardian last week in which the author, Daniel Kalder, draws attention to works that writers themselves – and not governments, say – have tried to ‘suppress’. The examples Kalder gives in ‘When writers censor themselves‘ … Continue reading →

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Michel Faber’s The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

Michel Faber’s 2001 novella The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (Canongate, 2001) centres on a 34-year-old parchment and paper conservator named Siân who is spending some time on an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. During her stay, she … Continue reading →

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Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

I first read Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America a dozen years ago in this Vintage International 25th anniversary edition dating from 1987. Although it’s now been half a century since the book came … Continue reading →

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Ross Miller’s Chicago

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

Ever since learning that Ross Miller, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and the editor of Philip Roth’s work in the Library of America, is working on the official biography of Philip Roth, I … Continue reading →

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Barbara Hodgson’s The Tattooed Map

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I’m always amazed at what I can come across in second-hand bookshops. Today I found a copy of the heavily illustrated / documented first novel The Tattoed Map by the Canadian novelist Barbara Hodgson. First published in 1995, a year … Continue reading →

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