Writing
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Presumably it’s not unreasonable to struggle with phonetically-written English if that’s the tactic adopted to try and conjure a particular accent. Doing so doesn’t make the work concerned ‘bad’ (nor automatically ‘good’); neither does it make me a ‘bad person’. (I assure you I try not to be!) But I did struggle with such poems…
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I’m not a particular fan of rules and guidance when it comes to writing fiction i.e. “show don’t tell”, “a story needs a beginning, middle and end” etc. There are multiple ways to construct a narrative and tell a story; I don’t see why we should restrict ourselves. Having said that, in reading Robert Seethaler’s…
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Simply excellent. In Red Sky in Morning Paul Lynch has woven an authentic and engrossing tale of desperate men, one who strives to escape, the other bent to do the catching. This is a brutal tale of misplaced men in a country that doesn’t want them. Lynch’s portrait of Faller is magnificent, n animal for…
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You may need to turn your volume up!
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Oh dear. And I’m usually such a fan of Ian McEwan’s work… What We Can Know was a real let-down. From my perspective, fundamentally flawed (and spoiler alert…) Setting the book in the middle of the twenty-second century: what was that all about? Not only completely unbelievable but distracting and unnecessary. The premise of the…
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We’re told by the cover flaps that Sam Riveire’s After Fame is a collection of 118 poems based – in some way shape or form – on Book 1 by the Roman poet, Martial. Which on the face of it is fair enough. However a significant proportion of the 118 are clearly not poems but…