The Fiction Desk Blog

This Telegraph article, claiming to list the 50 best cult books, is causing much puffing up of chests over missed classics, and sniping at overrated ones.

With book bloggers queuing up to argue over their favourite titles, it’s worth a read. (That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend an article that seems to favour John Fowles’ awful Durrell lite The Magus—which even its own mother couldn’t love—over The Alexandria Quartet; or that thinks the UK still had rationing in 1957…)

Wealthier readers of this blog might be interested in this news item on the BBC website.

Of course, buying the desk won’t make you a better writer, but it will mean you’re never short of something to talk about in restaurants (more…)

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 (more…)

Last month I finally managed to make my book lover’s pilgrimage to the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Almost—but not quite—the legendary bookshop that first published James Joyce’s Ulysses (the original shop, owned by Sylvia Beach, was at a different location and closed for good in 1941), the modern Shakespeare and Company is still a unique bookshop.

The shop is staffed at least in part by a team of enthusiasts, who work there in return for the use of one of the beds that are tucked discreetly between the bookcases. (more…)

Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away. (more…)