Boston

I spotted this tram stop poster on Acland Street in St Kilda today. It's for the city of Boston and is an attempt to encourage visitors to come to Boston in the wake of the negative publicity generated by the Boston bombings and the subsequent shoot out in Cambridge and Watertown. At first glance it might seem to be a poor use of Boston taxpayers money - doing an advertising campaign for the city 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, but I think...

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The Way of the World

a post from 2011.......The Way of the World, Nicolas Bouvier's story of his 18 month journey from Yugoslavia to India, undertaken 55 years ago with his friend Thierry in an unreliable Fiat is my book of the year so far. It was first self-published in Switzerland and has now been rereleased in a lovely edition by NYRB books complete with an introduction by the Marcel Proust of travel writing, Patrick Leigh Fermor....Bouvier and Thierry had no money...

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My 10 Favourite Westerns

To hell with Frank Miller, I would have gone with Grace Kelly in the cartI've blogged this list before but it's changed a bit in the last two years. (There's a  new entry at number 9.) This is not the list you'll see at Empire Magazine or at the AFI or whatever. You wont find Winchester 73 or Red River on here as these are my 10 personal favourites.10. Dead Man. Jim Jarmusch's alternative western with Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer and a brilliant...

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Why The Booker Prize Might Actually Go To The Year's Best Novel This Year

The Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday and it was an encouraging sign that the Booker people want their prize to be taken seriously as an award for the year's best or, at the very least, the most interesting novel. Too often the Booker has gone to someone in a clique of white, posh, North London based writers who have written some dreadful old rubbish that has been reviewed favourably by their friends in the broadsheet press. The Booker for a long time became a kind of lifetime achievement award for someone who had said the right things,...

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In The Morning I'll Be Gone

locked and bolted from the inside...I'm just finishing up the third Sean Duffy novel called In The Morning I'll Be Gone which, of course, is another homage/rip off of a Tom Waits title...You can listen to the marvellous In The Morning I'll Be Gone, here. (It's the one with the fantastic "I have a French companion" line which I think is the greatest line in the history of popular music.) ...The bulk of my In The Morning I'll Be Gone is going...

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The Australian Weighs In On Sirens

As you know I can't get a review of my Sean Duffy novels in the US press for love nor money (admittedly I haven't actually tried love or money...yet) but at least all the British, Irish and Australian newspapers are reviewing me. This latest review was from last Sunday's Australian newspaper and was written by the multi-talented Graeme Blundell who you non Aussies might still recognise as Natalie Portman's father in Star Wars......I Hear The Sirens...

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Ireland Is A Railway Poster: Philip Larkin In Carrickfergus

For years I've been single handedly peddling the concept that my hometown, Carrickfergus, is the centre of the universe, with admittedly, limited success. What I particularly like are the literary connections which are surprisingly rich in so small a place. Famously Louis MacNeice lived in Carrickfergus and wrote about it more than once. He brought WH Auden to the town to stay with him but what he thought is not recorded. Jonathan Swift lived...

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What The Failure Of JK Rowling's Crime Novel Says About The State of Crime Fiction

As you are no doubt aware it came out earlier this week that JK Rowling released a crime novel in the Spring under the name Robert Galbraith. The Cuckoo's Calling failed pretty spectacularly: it garnered few reviews and although those reviews were generally praiseworthy they were not ecstatic and the book vanished quickly from the shelves, selling about 500 copies*. Now that JK Rowling has "accidentally" been revealed as the book's author I imagine...

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15 'Great' Big Books You Don't Have To Read

Life is short, you've got a lot to do and you still havent watched The Wire or read War and Peace. Well I haven't watched The Wire either but fortunately I have read everything so here's a quick primer on 15 'great' big books that I've read so that you don't have to.1. Clarissa: It's unlikely that you'll chance on this by accident but if its on some kind of university course or book group reading list then run don't walk. This will take you hundreds...

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TransAtlantic

My review of Colum McCann's TransAtlantic from last week's Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald......Ask a random American to name the first person to fly across the Atlantic and they will probably tell you “Charles Lindbergh!” It’s something every school child knows and it is, of course, completely wrong. The chilly narcissist and Nazi sympathiser, Lindbergh, was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic but it was the British aviators...

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The Broken Road: A Time Of Gifts Part 3

Every month or so for the past 10 years I've been checking Amazon and Booklist to see when Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time Of Gifts: Part 3 is coming out. When Leigh Fermor died in 2011 without finishing the book I despaired but then I began to hear rumours that actually the ms. was near completion and his publishers, the venerable John Murray, were putting the book together from this ms. and Fermor's notes. Yesterday my internet persistence...

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