Palimpsest was launched at Gleebooks 17 April, 2010. Vrasidas Karalis and Ed Spence were there to speak about the book and Zoe Rodriguez was the charming MC for the night. The novel was born as a real book on 18 April by Australian Scholarly Publishing and is available for sale via their website or Gleebooks [...]

It is not that I ‘write what I know,’ but that I write what I need to know. It is not that I write what I have seen, but what I need to see. I write, not what I have learnt, but what I need to learn. I write, not what I have understood, but [...]

Interesting story on Murakami in The Prague Post online. This quote on the writing process caught my eye: Each book he writes represents a journey inside himself, he says. “I’m just sketching what I saw in the darkness,” he says. “Sometimes it’s fun, [but] sometimes it’s dangerous, so I have to protect myself. That’s why I’m running [...]

This past summer I was given Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire in its Greek incarnation – Ο Έρωτας θα ανατείλει ξανά. When I first opened the package and saw the title – Love Will Rise Again – I tried not to cringe at what on first look seemed like a melodramatic Greek romance novel. I [...]

My friend, Angel, sent me a link to a Guardian piece in which Brian Aldiss, author of Brothers of the Head (”the 1977 novel about conjoined twins who are exploited as a pop act [which] has now been made into a film”) looks at “the question of where creative ideas emerge from.” Aldiss writes: It’s [...]

A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves. – Iris Murdoch (I have no idea where this comes from. I’ve scribbled it on some [...]

Another great book review by Apostolos Vasilakis over at Greekworks.com. This time it’s a review of George Pelecanos’s The Night Gardener. Vasilakis begins the review with a quote from Petros Markaris, the Greek crime writer (Deadline in Athens) who was the subject of Vasilakis’s previous reviews. The quote: [The] detective novel becomes more and more [...]

Just spied an article in The Journal News on Doris Lessing’s upcoming novel The Cleft. She told The Journal News that: I saw a science magazine which said that the basic human type is female and that men came along afterward,” she explains. “You have an original community of females, on a seashore, very conventional. [...]

Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing. …begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the [...]