Tag Archives: fiction

FICTION FATIGUE

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Patrick Lennon
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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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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 →

Posted in Don DeLillo, Photography, Phototexts, Picture novels | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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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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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Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

The only curious thing about Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is that it actually was a critical and popular success when it was published in 2003, selling millions of copies and winning a number … Continue reading →

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A photo-text is a phototext is a photo text. Or is it?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

One of the funny things about “novels with pictures in them” is that, as I’ve said before, no one really agrees on what to call them, be it “illustrated novels”, or “iconotexts”, or “image-texts”, or “novels with photographs”, or “photography-embedded … Continue reading →

Posted in Georges Simenon, Germaine Krull, Phototexts, Picture novels, Wright Morris | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Where are the women?

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I see from AbeBooks.co.uk that among their top ten most expensive sales in September there is a copy of Dessins, thèmes et variations by Henri Matisse. First published by Fabiani in Paris in 1943, this volume features an introduction by Louis … Continue reading →

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Japanese noir: David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

Published in 2007, David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero, the first in a trilogy of novels, opens on 15 August 1945 with the discovery of a woman’s rotting corpse by one Detective Minami, minutes before Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast of Japan’s unconditional … Continue reading →

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Three different editions of Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

These three editions of Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte are in fact three very different books. The first edition, pictured left and dating from 1986, was published by Babel. The second edition, an English translation by Mike Mitchell, was published by Dedalus … Continue reading →

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