Owner: Pechorin's Journal URL:http://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.com Join Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:45:56 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: A literary blog discussing contemporary and world literature, as well as some genre works and non-fiction. Site statistics:Click here
A to the K 2008-12-15 09:10:41 AK47, The Story of the People’s Gun, is a work of social history and reportage by journalist Michael Hodges. It charts the rise of the AK 47 from it’s creation in the post WWII Soviet Union to its present status as - according to Hodge’s thesis - one of the most ubiquitous weapons on Earth [...]
The Lord sends me every misery He can think of just to try my soul. 2008-12-04 06:13:44 Tobacco Road, written by Erskine Caldwell in 1932, is a landmark work of American fiction. Often compared to Hemingway, Caldwell was most famous for his 1933 novel God’s Little Acre, but Tobacco Road had no small share of success in its own right. Saul Bellow apparently believed that Caldwell should have received the [...] Read more:every
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I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street. 2008-11-28 08:50:57 So starts the second of Derek Raymond’s factory novels, The Devil’s Home on Leave, uncoincidentally enough the second Derek Raymond novel I have read and while for me not as interesting as his first (He Died with His Eyes Open, which I have also written about here) I did enjoy it enough to order the [...]
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. 2008-11-18 11:29:06 Neuromancer is the first, and arguably best, novel by William Gibson. Originally published in 1984, it is a work that helped reinvigorate the science fiction genre in part by bringing in many elements more conventionally found in noir. It also spawned a wave of imitators, few of which come close to the immediacy [...] Read more:above
I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show. 2008-11-03 09:50:47 Q & A is the first novel of Indian novelist (and diplomat) Vikas Swarup. It is also the source for the upcoming Danny Boyle film Slumdogs, a film which based on this novel I would be interested in seeing as in many ways the work reads more as a screenplay treatment than as a novel.
At [...] Read more:arrested
The fallen angel of Chinese literature 2008-10-21 10:25:00 Lust, Caution is the title both of a short story collection by Eileen Chang, and of the first story in that collection. It is also, of course, a recent film by Ang Lee (one I haven’t seen as yet, my views on Ang Lee’s work are mixed though I understand this one is pretty [...] Read more:angel
, Chinese
I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me. 2008-10-15 04:15:00 The Gift of Rain is a first novel by Malaysian born author Tan Twan Eng. It was longlisted for the Booker in 2007, and I think could comfortably have been shortlisted in most years (whether it should have been in 2007 I can’t say, not having read that year’s shortlist).
It is a sweeping novel [...]
Castile has made Spain, and Castile has destroyed it 2008-10-05 10:12:00 Imperial Spain
is a history of the rise and decline of Imperial Spain between the years 1469 and 1716. It opens with the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, and ends with the final abolition of the Crown of Aragon and of the historic rights and privileges enjoyed by the people therein, an [...]
Every time we say goodbye 2008-10-04 11:44:00 Die A Little is a work of noir fiction by Megan Abbott, an American author with three fiction titles released in the US, of which Die a Little was her first and which is also her first to be released in the UK.
Die a Little is an unabashedly genre novel, not so much an homage [...]
Spanish fury 2008-09-28 07:41:00 Arturo Pérez-Reverte is probably Spain’s most successful contemporary writer, hugely popular in his home country and widely translated outside it. He is perhaps best known outside Spain for his contemporary thrillers, often involving a central motif taken from art or history. Increasingly, however, he is known for his Captain Alatriste series of swashbuckling historical novels, [...] Read more:Spanish
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