Storytelling is a Deadly Business: Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Letter Killers’ Club”
Anyone who has ever strolled into a Barnes & Noble and felt a certain despair at the sight of all those books lying on tables and shelves, many of them not very good, all of th
Happy New Apocalypse!
With apocalypse fever receiving a boost from all those alleged Mayan prophecies surrounding 2012, Daniel Kalder undertakes a brief survey of the history of Catholics and the End Ti
Boris Akunin Interview
Grigory Chkhartishvili, AKA Boris Akunin, is an international publishing phenomenon. A scholar of Japanese language and culture, and a former literary translator, he wrote his firs
The Wild World of Vladimir Sorokin
At the London Book Fair earlier this month, Russia was featured as Guest of Honor. Nearly every Russian writer of distinction was in attendance, save for one: Vladimir Sorokin
Robert Irwin: The Dabbling Dervish
Robert Irwin is an English writer who has written six novels and numerous studies of different aspects of Islamic culture. He is also the Middle Eastern editor of the Times Literar
Sakkadoo: Russia’s Boris Akunin on “The Way of the Writer”
An interview with Russian author, Boris Akunin.
Review: Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev
Drawings from the Gulag begins unexpectedly, with a headshot of a proud homo-sovieticus from one of the USSR’s eastern minorities. Wearing thick soviet spectacles and a soviet su
Gorbushka- Moscow’s One Stop Shop For Firearms And Pirate CDs
My favourite record shop was not a shop, but a once illegal open-air market in Moscow, Russia that went by the name ‘Gorbushka’. Legend has it that in the early ’90s you
Paradise Has Relocated
(Foreword to the book and gallery show by photographer Sandy Carson) I well remember the media build-up to the assault from Hurricane Ike that wiped out so much of Galveston, Texas
Authors, Social Media and the Allure of Magical Thinking
So anyway, I’ve got a great idea. Times are hard for publishers, therefore publicists should write books. No, really: they know what’s hot better than anyone. So they should wr