Tag Archives: photography

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 →

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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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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Anne Carson’s Nox

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

The Canadian poet Anne Carson’s brother Michael died in Copenhagen, Denmark in the year 2000, some 22 years after he had left Canada to avoid going to jail (what for remains unsaid, but he seems to have been involved in … 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 →

Posted in Mark Haddon, Picture novels | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in David Peace, Picture novels | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment