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The latest articles here on ReadySteadyBook, include Shiona Tregaskis' review of Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp ("Antwerp reads like the gathering of forensic evidence – loosely pertaining (or perhaps not at all) to a murder in the Costa Brava..."), Danny Byrne's essay on László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance ("his material is some of the oldest in literature: in fact, the symbolic devices read at times like a post-Nietzschean take on Elizabethan tragedy...") and Cassandra Moss's take on Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead ("the past, whilst immutable as a remote, completed whole, offers, in fine detail, movement and malleability")...

Unmissable stuff, so please read, comment, Tweet etc!

Also, make sure you haven't missed Simon Critchley's annotated bibliography for The Faith of the Faithless ("On my reading, what is being called for by Kierkegaard is a rigorous and activist conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantee or security, and which abides with the infinite demand of love, the rigor of love..."), and my interviews with the boys from The White Review ("To dismiss the discussion of complicated subjects as elitist is to deny people a stake in them...") and George Craig, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, and chief translator for the Letters of Samuel Beckett ("Beckett's handwriting is a perpetual source of difficulty, but long acquaintance makes it, for the most part, manageable. Translation is a problem mainly because SB does not simply "use" other languages, but plays with them.")

In the Haganah you give a month of yourself to working in a kibbutz. We worked inKiryat Anavim, up in the fields with the shepherds. One day there was a call that a group of new immigrants arrived from Germany. The kibbutz rang the bell for lunch and all these young immigrants scattered into the fields. They were screaming and running very fast. You could not get them to believe the bell was being rung so that they could be fed. They thought it was rung for the slaughter. They thought they would be taken if they did not hide themselves. This stayed with me all my life.

Good friend of – and regular contributor to – ReadySteadyBook, Leora Skolkin-Smith has a new short story, A Tape of Helen Gilderstein Speaking, published up on International Jewish Fiction. (For more about Leora see leoraskolkinsmith.com.)

In the autumn of 2000, I was a 20-year-old student in Cambridge, at home in the English language but new to England and the English. Producing dutiful but desiccated essays every week on regicide and gender-bending in Shakespeare, struggling meanwhile with the almost complete absence of rice and dal (“lentils”) in the British diet, I suddenly fell violently in love in an unlikely place – Galloway & Porter, a home for cut-price and remaindered books. Thankfully the object of my affections was, like Barkis, willing. She was, to squeeze out the last of my metaphor, The Novel.

Chandrahas Choudhury, an old pal of RSB, talks about Falling in love with the novel over at the Telegraph...

RSB interviewee Derek Attridge has a 50 minute talk (about Reading and Responsibility), originally delivered on October 16, 2007 at the University of Washington, up on ARCADE.

Back in 2003 when I started ReadySteadyBook the Booker Prize was something I had a modicum of interest in. Whilst the books on the list were never quite my cup of tea they did, I thought, represent a fairly good place to start with what was out there that was deemed a contemporary meaty read. With some scepticism, I bought the line that the Booker prize was a decent guide to the modern British novel.

Over the past eight or so years, my opinions on lots of things have modified and changed, but Booker fiction (which I've since rather pejoratively called Establishment Literary Fiction) continues, for me, to be the fairly "decent guide to the contemporary British novel" that I thought it was back in the day. And it is for that reason that I have so very little interest engaging with it here.

ReadySteadyBook has changed considerably over the last few years. I started it thinking I could maintain a kind of mini-Amazon – offering short reviews of lots of books across numerous genres. Very quickly I realised that I couldn't keep up with the slew of new books that get published each week and, moreover, that I didn't have anythig like the energy or commitment to review even a tiny percentage of them. So my focus sharpened and I began – as the site's tagline still declares – 'reviewing the very best books in literary fiction, poetry, history and philosophy.'

Not long after, I added a blog to the site and my 'online literary journal' started to have a relationship to and with the burgeoning blogosphere. And for a while I really enjoyed the camaraderie of my fellow book bloggers. ReadySteadyBook grew, I loved the feedback, got a little bit better at blogging, and began to articulate a little more clearly my feeling that 'literary fiction', whilst an often hugely entertaining genre, was not what I meant by – or required from – literature.

Recently (indeed almost since Lee did such a great job on RSB's facelift), I've allowed RSB's blog to become almost like a Tumblr: a place where I record the occasional apposite quote or link. ReadySteadyBook as an online 'journal' has continued to thrive (with excellent recent highlights including David Winters' review of Gary Gutting's Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960, David Auerbach's excellent essay on Hans Blumenberg, Barry Baldwin's review of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin: A New Verse Translation and Dai Vaughan's breathtaking essay on Jean-Pierre Melville). But as blog I'm not sure it is cutting the mustard. And, you know, that is ok. It is ok because I no longer want the RSB blog even to be a "literary blog"...

When Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? landed I was pretty taken aback by the bile directed towards it by many reviewers. But I was also amazed by their ignorance of the philosophical underpinnings of Josipovici's astonishing essay. After reading countless reviews, one couldn't help but be shocked by how many reviewers simply hadn't understood what Josipovici was trying to do. Now, Josipovici wears his philosophical learning pretty lightly, so it is only right not to read his work as an academic treatise, but philosophers like Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, critics like Blanchot, historians like Eamon Duffy, haunt his work. What Ever Happened to Modernism? engages with an argument that has been raging at least since Max Weber first articulated his notion of the "disenchantment of the world" and uses that as a rubric to see what is so exceptional in the work of writers as widely geog

In the latest article here on RSB, classicist A.T. Reyes describes the background to his C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile:

I have no doubt that, like a sort of tutelary divinity, the spirit of Virgil was present at meetings of the Inklings literary circle in Oxford. In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien delivered the Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy on the subject of Beowulf, which considered, in part, the similarities and differences between that Anglo-Saxon epic and the Aeneid. When he joined the Inklings in 1939, Charles Williams had already published a small volume re-telling the adventures of Aeneas, and in his Arthurian poems, Virgil appears as a central symbol of civilisation. But it was C.S. Lewis whose thoughts and writings were most deeply affected by Virgil's masterpiece. His correspondence and writings make clear that he had begun a translation of the Aeneid in 1933, the very year, according to the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, that the Inklings came into being. Lewis is known to have read out portions of his translation during meetings in 1943 and 1944, and in 1962, he wrote that the Aeneid was one of 10 books that had done the most to shape his "vocational attitude and philosophy of life."

Read the whole article.

In October 2003, ReadySteadyBook coyly appeared on the Web, in clothes I rashly designed myself. About three years later, a new look was already desperately required, and Lee Kelleher, Kelle Link and Liza Lemsatef Cunningham helped style RSB for the noughties.

But fashion dates, and RSB's regalia has been looking rather raggedy recently. As ever, Mr Kelleher – friend, confidante, crack coder! – could be relied upon to come up with the goods, and the new look RSB – very classy and pared-back, easily navigable, and with an engine that simply purrs – is up and running because of his kindness, excellent eye and hours of hard work.

Lee, I salute and thank you. RSB-readers, I commend our new look and feel.

Huzzah!

Actually, I've not gone fishin' at all, but we are freezing the data (!) here on ReadySteadyBook whilst we do a major upgrade of the site (especially in the "back end")...

See you in July.

Is Vasily Grossman beginning to achieve (in the English-speaking world) the recognition that is his due? I've never read him, so I actually don't know if he is even due said recognition (he doesn't feel like my kind of guy) but RSB interviewee Robert Chandler (Grossman's translator) reckons he is, so I should probably pull my finger out and give him a read. I should probably pull my finger out and interview Robert again too, as we last spoke about 5 years ago!

Recent sightings (and citings) of Grossman include: Vasily Grossman, Russia's greatest chronicler, awaits redemption (in the Guardian); In praise of... Vasily Grossman (Guardian CIF); Anti-Socialist Realism (TNR); Everything flows: Robert Chandler on Vasily Grossman (Vulpes Libris); and A Russian titan revealed... (BookSerf).

Just a wee reminder -- when it goes quiet here on ReadySteadyBook it is probably because I'm pretty slammed, but that doesn't mean there isn't much inconsequential chatter, and often some pretty interesting links, being thrown into the ether from my Twitter account... Read the rest of this post

At the launch event for Best European Fiction 2010 a few weeks ago, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse made some wonderfully cutting and dismissive remarks about crime fiction.

Literature is basically a personal, and at the same time universal, asking into the fundamentals of existence, made possible by the aesthetic possibilities of language. The more personal it gets, the more universal it becomes. When literature gets private, it looses its quality, as it does if it ends up as universal in this sense: something everyone agrees about.

Of course, one can learn about life in literature, for instance to see how life is for other persons, perhaps in another time, in another culture: in the novel everyone has the right to be understood, nowhere else. And to me dramatic literature is about getting a glimpse of the forces that somehow, in their invisible way, direct life. But more than this, literature is about learning to die, as Harold Bloom has put it.

What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.

Death, perhaps literature’s basic concern, at least when doubled with what cannot exist without it, love, is in crime fiction made into a kind of puzzle which can be solved. Death is made safe by being looked at as something which might well not exist, if it wasn't for a murder, and then is reduced further by making this murder, death, into a puzzle to be solved. And which will be solved.

And when even the aesthetic ambition, this never-ending process of saying it all again, seen from a new perspective, is replaced by filling out a plot with variations, how can one possibly see crime fiction as literature? Add some political correctness to this plot, and we live in a perfectly safe and stupid world.

Literature is writing so strong that one sees life as something else after meeting it. It has to do with the uniqueness in every human being, and with this truth: the most unique is the most universal. Crime fiction is the opposite, to see life as the same all the time and feel safe in one's lie. It's pornography of death, and much less honest than the pornography which has to do with the beginning of life.

A quick ReadySteadyBook round-up...

The latest three book reviews:

• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
• I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
• Erasure by Percival Everett

The latest three articles:

interview with Mark Fisher, author of 'Capitalist Realism'
• False quantities: on Martin Amis’s hobbyhorse
• 1984: Minitruths and Maxiluv

Three from me on Shakespeare:

• A question suggests itself: Derrida, Shields and Capitalist Realism
• King Lear, madness and my grandmother
• Hamlet and I...

A question suggests itself -- and I'm certainly not the first to ask it: why in a book ostensibly about Karl Marx does Jacques Derrida divert himself, and us, at such considerable length, considering 'Hamlet'? If we choose not to accuse Derrida of bad faith or wilful obscurantism -- which, anyway, would only show our own bad faith, or an obscure lack of understanding concerning his project -- then we must take him absolutely at his word. We read Spectres of Marx and note that 'Hamlet' allows Derrida to think, and to think of Marx. 'Hamlet' supplies him with the metaphors that allow him to unpack Marx's own metaphors and allow us to see how these metaphors structure Marx, structure 'Hamlet' and could deconstruct (unstructure) our idea both of Marxism and the destructive reality of our capitalist present.

But is something more happening here? Should we ask: can the political only be thought about via/with fictional narrative and the metaphors it lends? Further, can we only think progressively about our collective present and other possible futures if the metaphors we use are deeply embedded in our collective life? Jacques Ranciere, in The Aesthetic Unconscious, problematises our understanding of Freud's use of the Oedipus myth. Did Freud use the Oedipus myth as a metaphor for the unconscious, or was the unconscious already shaped by Oedipus's story? Did Freud use the story or did the story use Freud? Bluntly, I don't think we can think without literature. I don't think we do think without literature. Further, I don't think we can possibly think ourselves out of our current impasse, and the impasse of our thinking, without it.

One of the very many obtuse things about David Shields' obtuse "manifesto" Reality Hunger -- an obtuse book which contains many wonderful quotes about literature and life and which could have been simply a very fine commonplace book -- is its obtuse and strident assertion that the line between the real and the fictive was in any way ever absolute and that the commingling of these two supposedly separate realms will save literature from redundancy.

Mark Fisher describes the foreclosing of (political) thought that could envision different (social) futures as Capitalist Realism. His short book is highly recommended: not least to someone like Shields who seems to think that reality is a given rather than a perpetually socially constructed fiction which we half-wittingly recreate each and every day of our lives.

If the recent banking crisis showed us anything it was that the make-believe is at the heart of what we tell ourselves is real -- and that fiction becomes fact when we have faith enough, or fear, in the (empty) lies that keep us in our places. Those who rule our world kill to maintain the presence of this absence every single day. Every day thousands starve or go cold, kids are bombarded in Iraq whilst neoliberal bloggers cheer, countless bore themselves stupid in offices -- all so that bankers in Saville Row suits are maintained and preserved, and maintain the fiction that thinking beyond a system predicated on their maintainance and preservation is an impossibility.

What is deconstruction? Or, perhaps, that better question from earlier: what was Derrida saying it was when he wrote a book about Marx that was actually much about 'Hamlet'? He was, surely, demonstrating -- more than that, he instantiated it in the very weft and warp of his argument -- that the political is structured

To help keep things moving here on ReadySteadyBook, the matchless Mr Rowan Wilson -- a very dear friend, and already a contributor to the site and regular commenter -- will, in the future, be blogging alongside me. He'll be writing one or two pieces a week, so do please make him very welcome... Read the rest of this post

Well, ReadySteadyBook, as you'll have noticed, is slowly starting to wake from its long summer slumber. I'm now pretty settled in sunny West London -- and it has been a quite beautiful September weather-wise -- and beginning, I think, to find my feet. I trust that this means that there will be more -- and more regular -- blogging here on ReadySteadyBlog and more content in general throughout the site (with URLs and links to generally interesting stuff also flying out from Twitter). I'm attending an awful lot of launches at the moment, so you may hear about a good few of those too.

On Monday, Robin Durie reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson Galileo's Dream, pondering throughout SF's literary value on the back of Robinson's recent Booker-inspired comments. Yesterday, Pakistan-born writer, and long term contributor to RSB, Soniah Kamal took on Ali Sethi's novel of his Pakistani childhood, The Wish Maker. Later today, Barry Baldwin will review Orwell's 1984 -- is there really anything more to say about this, ahem, "enduring classic"? Barry reckons there is, and I do too after reading his excellent piece. Tomorrow, theatre-expert Natasha Tripney reviews Percival Everett's Erasure. And on Friday, my good friend Kit Maude, now resident in Argentina, makes his first intervention as my Latin American Editor. At some point, I'll also post a longish review of Coetzee's excellent new novel Summertime...

Next week, I will do a little intro to Sarah Hesketh which, I'm hoping, will make her out herself as my poetry editor (her recently published collection, Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf (Penned in the Margins), is mighty fine and requires my review. I am on task, promise! In the meantime, nice review of STB here.) Also, by that time, I'm hoping Mr Richard Seymour (yes, he of Lenin's Tomb fame) will have penned me a little something too.

This week's two highlighted RSB Books of the Week are The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl by J.N. Mohanty (Yale University Press) described in the publisher blurb as a "deeply insightful book [that] traces the development of Husserl's thought from his earliest investigations in philosophy... to his publication of Ideas in 1913" and On the Death and Life of Languages by Claude Hagege (again, Yale University Press) which "seeks to make clear the magnitude of the cultural loss represented by the crisis of language death" -- the rate of attrition comes in at the loss of 25 languages each year.

In the latest review here on ReadySteadyBook, Robin Durie reviews Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson:

I was intrigued by Kim Stanley Robinson's attack on the conservatism of the Booker prize, its tendency to favour historical fiction whilst overlooking science fiction, and his claim that science fiction at its best explores the new, for a number of reasons. First, I think the general thrust of his critique is well justified. Second, over the last 12 months I have consciously begun reading a fair bit of science fiction (a genre I had more or less ignored since my teenage years). And, third, when I read the article, I was in the midst of reading Robinson’s new novel, Galileo's Dream.

Whilst Robinson was making specific claims about the UK SF scene, the timing of his intervention nevertheless prompted the question of how his own book measures up to the criteria of his critique. The book -- which, at nearly 600 large scale pages, shares a common predicament with the tendency of both historical fiction and SF to indulge in length, often, it seems, for its own sake -- has a structure which has felt forced and not entirely successful to most reviewers. In "parallel" stories (how and why they are not parallel will prove to be significant), Robinson depicts Galileo more or less biographically, as his astronomical observations and interpretations inexorably lead him into conflict with the Catholic church; whilst, at the same time, Galileo makes a series of journeys to the moons of Jupiter, at a time some 3000 years in the future, where the descendants of humanity are about to encounter their first alien species. The threat would have been that, by this plot device, Robinson might risk undermining the scientific achievements of Galileo. Whilst for much of the book, the "parallel" stories do sit uncomfortably alongside one another, by its conclusion, Robinson's gamble reaps a very rich reward (more...)

The latest interview here on ReadySteadyBook is with Owen Hatherley who blogs at sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy, which focuses on aesthetic and political issues in architecture and music, and who has just written his first book -- Militant Modernism:

For myself, and numerous others who aren't part of any old boy networks, or who are neither adept at nor interested in networking and private views, [the internet] provided an outlet which simply wouldn't otherwise exist, or if so in the more retro form of the fanzine. I first started reading on the internet rather than regarding it as a kind of expensive Ceefax because of a rash of blogs around 2002 – Blissblog, New York London Paris Munich, then the less musically-focused, philosophical, political and poetic blogs like K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Heronbone, Citta Violenta, The Pillbox, Lenin's Tomb. I had wondered where the critical writing about popular culture which used to have a space in the music press and to a lesser extent the likes of The Face had disappeared to, and there it was, on the internet. It took another few years of procrastinating before I got mine together. These blogs seemed a reaction to the closing-down of discourse which occurred in the late 90s, where the music press no longer existed as an entity interested in politics and wider culture, and the internet actually created something better, something where there was more potential for response, more space, more depth, and yes, more democracy (more...)

blogRank "uses over 20 different factors to rank the blogs in any category. Some of the factors include: RSS membership, incoming links, Compete, Alexa, and Technorati ranking, and social sites popularity."

According to the blogRank ranking ReadySteadyBook is the 21st most popular literary blog out there. Indeed, RSB is the only British blog on the list, aside from the London Review of Books website which most certainly is not a blog. It's an odd list -- a book site list rather than a blog list really -- but it is interesting to be well-placed on a chart which is created via such an array of data.

The latest book review here on ReadySteadyBook is by Alexandra Masters writing about Gide's The Immoralist:

For André Gide, writing The Immoralist was a near-death experience. "I have lived it for four years and have written it to put it behind me," he wrote to a friend. "I suffer a book as one suffers an illness. I now respect only the books that all but kill their authors." Now that's dedication. If this is the case, novelists today might think twice before penning their next oeuvre, or at least take a very deep breath (more...)

The three previous book reviews around here have been: Lucy Popescu on Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction; novelist Leora Skolkin-Smith on J.M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star; and writer and poet Carey Harrison on Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

Whilst I'm at it, the three previous articles on ReadySteadyBook have been: an interview with Lenin's Tomb blogger Richard Seymour; an interview with novelist Paul Griffiths; and Sophie Lewis's joint review of The Erotic Potential of My Wife and The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

And the last three long blog posts have been: me on reading poetically; me on liking whatever you like; and me on Anita Brookner.

It has been a very busy past couple of weeks up here in the windswept North, not least with me working away to bed-down and improve the content on the newly upgraded Book Depository website. And, to be honest, it's been a pretty difficult year for other more personal reasons too. Add to this the fact that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has robbed me of all the rest of any of the free time I might have had and you can see why RSB hasn't exactly been a hive of activity of late.

But, as I know happens with many bloggers, my busyness has coincided with thoughts about where I want RSB to go, what I want to do with it, what I want it to achieve and what I want to achieve with it, or via it; what I want to explore here and what I want to write about.

I'm somewhat in agreement with Andrew Seal when he wrote this below about his own blogging blues back in February:

This blog is much more like the blogs I don't much care for: wholly dependent on what I "happen upon" in my reading, whether that's what I found on the web today or what book I picked up for vague reasons or no reason. I've been struggling with how to change that, how to add to or change this blog in ways that will make it less adventitious, short of imposing a mandatory reading list on myself or ceasing to blog about anything but a narrow subject. I want to keep a little randomness: I don't object to randomness—I just don't like the self-satisfied surrender to entropy that comes with the idea that I'll blog about whatever catches my fancy.

I used to keep RSB ticking over with links to interesting literary things that I found on the web. I'll still do that from time to time, but I've found that Twitter is a better medium for me to chuck interestng URLs out into the world (anyway, if you want great links you can't beat wood s lot). What this should mean is that when I do write something here at RSB it is of more value and consequence than simply contextualising a link or two, but that requires more time and effort... and energy. And it is energy that I feel so desperately short of right now.

The latest interview here on ReadySteadyBook is with Paul Griffiths author of the OuLiPo-inspired novel let me tell you:

There was a soldier at the table. Quite still. And I could see two letters on the table, where his hand lay on them. One of them must have come from his brother, the one that had gone away some months before. All this time he had his head cast down, so I could not see his eyes. I tell you it as I remember it. Do I have to say that? I did not know him from before, this soldier at the table with his head down. I do not know where he comes from. (More...)

Now, I know I'm never going to beat Gaiman but -- come on -- I don't want to lose! Vote ReadySteadyBook!

There is a useful round-up of some of the Best of the Year lists over on Dani Torres' A Work in Progress blog. BTW, the RSB Books of the Year symposium will land in a few weeks.

One of my Books of the Week this week is A Time to Speak Out "a collection of strong Jewish voices, drawing on an established tradition of Jewish dissidence, come together to explore some of the most challenging issues facing diaspora Jews, notably in relation to the ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine."

Thanks to the good folk at Verso (thanks Rowan!) we have a PDF version of Gabriel Josipovici's contribution to A Time to Speak Out, Cousins, up on RSB for you to enjoy. Go read!