In search of the Great British Novel

The Great American Novel. It stands as one of the holy grails of world literature, with Twain, Melville, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Vonnegut and several others comprising an elite group of writers who have distilled the spirit of their country into stunning prose. As Lindesay Irvine has argued in these pages, it is not unfair to say [...]

L’Age d’Or (1930)

Directed by Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali. The film you can watch here.
Read: L’Âge d’or: faux-raccord (false match) by Sophy Williams.

Tales of the Arabesque

Mosque – Cathedral of Cordoba Spain/Royal Chapel Arabesque
From Giornale Nuovo 
Not quite a year ago, further to a post here about the grotesque in art, Marly asked if I might also write something similar about the arabesque. This idea rested on a cold back-burner until a couple of weeks ago, when I acquired a booklet entitled [...]

My sex in the convent – by Nobel poet

The verses would be no more than the erotic, if masterful, outpourings of a prodigious poet and Nobel laureate were it not for the fact that they appear to talk of his amatory adventures with a series of nuns. But now that a Spanish publishing company has decided it is time to publish the erotic [...]

Discovering Miguel de Unamuno

by María L. Trigos-Gilbert, October 27, 1998
Miguel de Unamuno is the writer of the masterpiece called San Manuel Bueno, mártir, Saint Manuel Good Martyr; this is one of his best works. The life of Unamuno wasn’t easy since he was always crying out for acceptance in the Spanish world. Unamuno was a native of the [...]

‘Karnak Cafe’ awakens painful memories of 1967 war

Late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s angriest novel on the Arab-Israeli conflict is published 40 years later for the first time in English translation
Forty years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the American University in Cairo Press has published Naguib Mahfouz’s angriest novel about the crisis for the first time ever in English translation. The plot of [...]