Enhanced Editions found via James Hogwood Intrigued by this. A multimedia iphone ebook app that lets you switch between text, audio and video without losing your place. It all looks beautifully seamless. Despite the fact that I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks, I’m seriously tempted to give this a go. But although I [...]

I love Thomas Pynchon. I love the richness of his prose. Each sentence feels important, as if cast from heavy metals. And I love how he makes no concession at all to the reader. There is no compromise in the arcaneness of his references, or the number of characters he’ll introduce and fleetingly re-introduce over [...]

Just finished Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the next Millennium”, newly re-released as  a lovely looking Penguin Modern Classic. Calvino was due to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1985/6, but died before he finished writing them. This book is the collected draft versions of what would have been those lectures. Each lecture addressed [...]

In the spirit of ‘blog all earmarked pages’ thing to which I can find no reference on the internet at all at 6.15 on a Saturday morning. (edit: because it should be ‘blog all dog-eared pages‘) Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could [...]

David Foster Wallace is dead. He was my favourite writer. Both his prose and his non-fiction have a wit and intelligence that I’ve struggled to find in anyone else. I remember reading The Girl With Curious Hair and The Broom Of The System and A Supposedly Fun Thing… in the mid-nineties I guess, almost wide-mouthed [...]