Day #12039

May will see the next instalment of the Guernsey Literary Festival, with visits from everyone from Simon Singh to Jonathan Wilson to Clare Balding!  (Well, not everyone between each of those people, though maybe everyone between those people if they are all stood in one room sometime around the 11th-14th May, in Guernsey).  Anyway, a list of events can be found on the Litfest website.

I’ll be writing some pieces for the Litfest blog  and have already posted a review of Simon Singh’s ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem.’  There will surely be more writing about writing to be had, so keep your eyes peeled like potatoes.

Day #12038 – Goodreads Updates: Short Story Collections

Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams

Shortly after I read this and recommended it to a writer friend, I wrote in an email:

“Some of Diane Williams’ sentences make my head spin – it’s like someone deconstructing their thoughts on to the page, I found I could feel my brain putting things back together.”

I probably can’t add anything more insightful now. Some of Williams’ thoughts and trains of thought are just weird and exhilirating. These are stories you have to commit too fully and enjoy.

It Was Just Yesterday by Mirja Unge

This is a wonderful set of short stories which I raced through because I was enjoying them so much. The narrator of each could be the same character – they share a sense of wonder, maybe a little naivety, a raw morality. Unge presents us with a constant stream of reality, events are presented to us, simply described, one after another, as if we are not to judge but merely observe.

The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova

This is a wunderkammer that thrums with life – the kind of life that is a bit deathy. If it is reminiscent of anything it is of Eraserhead, the 1978 debut film from David Lynch – it’s there in the sense of displacement, sense of terror in everyday living. These are stories that somehow make a noise – the steady churn of a bleak dystopian industrial landscape – but which are illuminated with chimes of luminescent gothic ornamentation.

View all my reviews

Roses In The Snow

Time will pass in no time at all.  We kept those flowers, the late winter hotel breakfast flowers… we kept them well past late winter time, well past breakfast time, kept them as a reminder of the breakfast in that hotel we stayed at in late winter.  The flowers start to prickle and sweat, a soft fuzz of sweet-looking mould spawns across them and back in late winter we saw roses in the snow, but these are not those nor nothing so neat.  These are flowers that start out as a haiku then become a messy paragraph which evolves with scribblings out until we give in and submit.  The late winter hotel breakfast flowers flop, decomposed and decomposing, become late late winter hotel breakfast flowers.