Far North is my first encounter with Marcel Theroux (son of Paul, brother of Louis), and the author’s fourth novel. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic near future / alternative present / alternative recent past (doesn’t say; probably doesn’t matter), among a series of deserted towns that form a kind of new Wild East, where an increasingly desperate American population has colonised parts of Russia before all but dying out among snow, ice, and social collapse.

Far North is narrated by Makepeace, a peacekeeper who still does her rounds in one of these frozen, deserted towns. (Her gender is kept hidden for a few chapters, before being revealed in an Amis-like flourish, surprising but not interesting.) The first third or so of the book consists of brief, disjointed encounters with a variety of pleasant, unpleasant, and deeply unpleasant people, and concludes with her imprisonment in a labour camp. Working in the camp, she begins to hear rumours of “The Zone”, a contaminated area still full of the riches of mankind’s past… (Keep reading …)

A conversation this morning with RobAroundBooks on Twitter reminded me of a forgotten but much-loved imprint, Rebel Inc. Classics. I was surprised that people hadn’t heard of them, but looking around, it does seem that they’ve been pretty effectively erased from the publishing landscape. With some of their titles fetching (or at least, asking) high prices on eBay, they probably aren’t even that easy to find in the secondhand shops anymore. (Keep reading …)

A while ago I was staying at Il Loggiato in Bagno Vignoni in Siena. It’s a lovely little place in a tiny (two dozen buildings?) spa town on the side of a hill. The accommodation was great, and the two sisters who run it put a lot of work into making a friendly, informal atmosphere; there’s a tray of fresh cakes and wine in the lounge for the guests to help themselves, and there was also a little stack of free books. Naturally, I helped myself liberally to all three, but here I’ll concern myself with the books. (Keep reading …)

In Rhyming Life and Death, the latest novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, an unnamed author walks the streets of Tel Aviv, killing time before he’s due to appear at a talk on his work in a nearby cultural centre. He dreads the coming series of questions—Why do you write? What do you think of other writers? Do you write with a pen or a computer?—all of which he’s heard before, and all of which he will answer tonight just as evasively, as vaguely, as he always has done. Sitting in a cafe, he attempts to distract himself from the upcoming event by creating a back story for the waitress who serves him. Her name is Ricky, he decides, and he goes on to imagine the story of her first love affair. (Keep reading …)

Now in their fifth year, UK-based Snowbooks describe themselves as a “feisty, award-winning independent book publisher”. Their list includes a range of general and genre fiction, along with sports, martial arts, and craft books. They’re a tech-savvy bunch, even providing these services to other publishers with their Snowangels project, so it should be interesting to see what they’ve done with their own online presence.

First impressions

The first thing that hits you about the Snowbooks design is how open it is: there’s plenty of white space here, and everything has room to breathe. (Keep reading …)

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been dedicating odd hours to not reading Brothers, the new novel by Chinese author Yu Hua.

It started a few months ago, round about the time that we had all that fuss about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. That book was getting a lot of coverage, and I was thinking of getting hold of a copy and reviewing it myself, but it was an awfully big book, and it was being very ably reviewed elsewhere. Still, I liked the idea of grappling with a big, translated monster, and so I was intrigued when I heard about the imminent arrival of Yu Hua’s Brothers. (Keep reading …)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them (Keep reading …)

While book sites and blogs may be wary of turning their attention too directly towards mere television, it’s interesting how often conversation in the smoky, after hours underworld of the comments section turns to favourite series. Here, The Fiction Desk takes a look at some of the television programs most often cited and loved by the acolytes of the printed page. (Keep reading …)

I’m not usually a big fan of repackaging books—it tends to happen a lot these days, and I think the noise can distract from new fiction. However, there are exceptions: I liked the recent (and ongoing) series of Atlantic Crime Classics, and the new Magnum Collection from Penguin, published today, also seems to be a good-looking little set. (Keep reading …)

Sticking with the theme of genre fiction for this second post in a series of publisher website reviews, let’s move from newcomer Angry Robot to a more established player. PS Publishing will need no introduction to British fans of horror, science fiction, or fantasy. They’ve been printing novels and novellas for a decade now, and have their own magazine, Postscripts. They regularly pick up awards, both for individual titles and for the operation as a whole, and on the few occasions that I’ve had contact with them, they’ve also seemed like very nice people. (Keep reading …)