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Twice tonight I have tried to post an innocuous message on General Chat and each time I have been told to wait until it is approved by a moderator. As we don't seem to have a fucking moderator on this apology for a forum any longer, I'm off, and will not be trying (in vain) to post here again...

I haven't read this book myself, I'm just giving a link to Philip Hensher's review of it in Saturday's Guardian review section - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/19/alice-judith-hermann-review Hensher uses phrases like "richly and indeed ecstatically observed", "observed with...

I'm sure this book has been discussed on the forum already, but I can't find the thread. Anyway, it's going to be serialised on BBC Radio Four with a starry cast including Kenneth Branagh, Greta Scacchi and Janet Suzman. Here's an interview with Suzman in today's Guardian -...

miobrien said earlier this year that this was his favourite Murakami novel. There's a theatrical version at this year's Edinburgh Festival, playing this very month. A world premiere - http://www.eif.co.uk/wubc Harry

Foreigners used to often have the perception that Britain is the country where "everything stops for tea". Recent experience shows that this may not be a myth. Here in Scotland ambulance crews have been in dispute with their employers over extra payments for turning out for emergencies during...

Agnar Þórðarson (1917-2006) was the son of the director of Reykjavik's mental hospital and his Danish wife, and grew up in an educated and cosmopolitan milieu. It was in his family home at Kleppur that WH Auden and Louis MacNeice stayed as guests while gathering material for their Letters from...

Writers discuss the writers they admire themselves in the context of the EIBF - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/12/edinburgh-book-festival-writers-picks Harry

It's not often that the Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington dishes out a five-star review - http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/aug/09/anna-christie-review Harry

First paragraph in the Scotsman article illustrated by the attached photo - "Foreign governments have warned their citizens that visiting Britain is dangerous, as mobs continued looting and rioting across the UK last night". The paper ought to know better than to talk about the UK as the riots...

Sjón is the pen-name of Icelandic novelist, poet and lyricist Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson. It's a pretty good pen-name for a writer because as well as being a feasible abbreviation for Sigurjón, it's also the Icelandic word for 'vision' or 'sight'. I'm assuming that was in his mind when he chose...

Sjón is the pen-name of Icelandic novelist, poet and lyricist Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson. I've been looking for information about him online as he will be appearing in just over two weeks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF). I'll post about him later today on the European...

I find it so funny when academics have a very public spat, and of course, being educated and civilised people, they can't let rip with a stream of invective - they feel obliged to keep it polite. But from what they say and how they say it, you can sense the bile behind the blandness. Lady...

There is already a short thread about the Canadian writer Alice Munro, misplaced at General Discussion, despite Stiffelio's request to have it moved to a more appropriate location - http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/43345-Alice-Munro?highlight=Alice+Munro Her...

What the hell next? I'm devoutly glad that I went to university when I did, as one of the pampered "baby boomers" who got my fees paid and a full grant, non-repayable, and I haven't had to go through life burdened by a crippling student debt. Now some Scottish academic says students should be...

Stan Barstow, who has just died, was one of the leading writers of the gritty realism school of the 1950s and 1960s, rather snobbishly denigrated at the time as the "kitchen-sink" school. Anybody of my age will mainly associate him with his breakthrough novel A Kind of Loving (1960), which was...

Eric has talked elsewhere - on the Poetry thread at General Discussion - about Edward Thomas, one of the English poets killed in WWI. Apart from the WWI poets - like Thomas, Owen and Sassoon - most of the poets who published before the outbreak of the Great War are now looked on as impossibly...

Is anybody here a keen fan of museums? Do you have a favourite museum you can tell us about? If, like Liam, you live in one of the world's megacities, you will be spoiled for choice, but even if you live in a small place far from the metropolis you may have an interesting local museum. I've been...

Eric name-checks Stella Rimington on the News Discussion thread, and if Louise Bagshawe-Mensch can get her own entry here, I think we should afford the same courtesy to Ms. "Now that I've told you that, I'll have to kill you" Rimington. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/stella-rimington/ If...

I noticed a tiny death-notice in yesterday's Guardian for the poet and Scandinavian translator Anne Born, who did many literary translations from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Hopefully one or more of the broadsheets will carry a proper obituary of her...

I'm mainly posting this appreciation of Sven Delblanc to show how a writer can be very highly rated in his homeland (Sweden in this case) while remaining utterly unknown in the English-speaking world. http://www.delblancsallskapet.se/about.html Delblanc is looked on as one of the very best...