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Laura Restrepo, Leopard In The Sun (El Leopardo al Sol), 1993 The beginning is like something straight out of Scarface; the pock-marked gangster and the beautiful woman he's always wanted are sitting at the bar when a rival enters, yells something about revenge for something that happened 20...

So apparently the rapture is on Saturday. Anyone going (and if so, can I have your stuff?) or are you waiting for the Maya thing to kick in on 21 December 2012, or the next time the Swiss try to fire up the LHC? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY&feature=player_embedded Seriously...

It seems we don't have a thread on AA Milne. Since today is apparently Eeyore's birthday, and he's one of my favourite book characters, I thought I'd start one and post this link: Eeyore: Literature's archetypal outsider | Books | guardian.co.uk Also, here's a Winniepedia link on Milne...

Svetlana Aleksievich: Voices From Chernobyl - The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster (Чернобыльская молитва, 1997) The first interview is with the widow of one of the firemen who were sent in on the first day. He'd been shoveling radioactive sludge dressed in only jeans and a t-shirt, his skin...

Jean Giono: Hill Of Destiny (Colline, 1929) The best horror stories are always those that yank the carpet out under us, that serve up a nice harmonic everyday scenario and suddenly make us see the cracks in the foundation, the grinning skulls behind the smiles, how easy it is to lose your...

Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Slave (Der Knact, 1962) High up in the mountains sits Jacob, a Polish Jew, the last of his family following the latest in a series of massacres. No, it's not the 1940s, it's mid-17th century, though obviously the still-recent memories of WWII were at the back of...

Alain Mabanckou: Memoirs of a Porcupine (Memoires de porc-épic, 2008) Under a tree in the Congo sits the world's oldest porcupine. He's spent far longer than any porcupine should live as the evil double - alter ego, if you will, dark passenger if you're a Dexter fan - to an alleged serial...

Patti Smith: Just Kids (2010) They're so very young when they meet up, seemingly the definition of wide-eyed idealists; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe run into each other on a street corner in New York in 1967, both 20 years old. One would go on to reinvent rock music, being hailed as the...

Karl Ove Knausgård: My Struggle, vol 1 (Min kamp, 2009) What's to say about a book that's been hyped as much as this one? Why not start here: at first, everything I heard about My Struggle led me to believe it was hyped for all the wrong reasons. People talked about it being a gigantic...

Full Dark, No Stars - Full review, three stars Ah yes, Stephen King, the horror writer who supposedly has mellowed a bit in his old age and tried to become a "proper" writer who doesn't need monsters and ghosts to tell a story. And sure enough, of the four stories in Full Dark, No Stars...

...well, maybe. NASA - NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2 I, for one, welcome our new overlords.

Zero History. The future keeps coming closer. To quote a common statistic, it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, the Internet 4 years, Facebook less than a year to reach 200 million... So it makes sense that the horizon comes closer for William Gibson too. He made his fame with...

alik-vit mentioned her in the Nobel thread, and I'm currently reading Voices From Chernobyl and would describe myself as engrossed. Nicked from wikipedia: Svetlana Alexievich - Voices from Big Utopia - Home Page, Swetlana Alexijewitsch Aleksievich is a non-fiction writer, but in the foreword...

"Aw's prose is lucid, uncluttered, beautiful" says the blurb on the back. Then you get passages describing a house like this: "Uncluttered"? Really? Tash Aw's Map Of The Invisible World is set in Indonesia in 1964 - the so-called Year of Living Dangerously, with political upheavals and...

Political dystopias found their form in the first half of the 20th century, with books like Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as the big three. I'd argue that Karin Boye's Kallocain (1940) deserves to be mentioned in the same context; it's certainly at...

I first read Breat Easton Ellis' 1985 debut Less Than Zero years and years ago, after reading and falling in love with American Psycho. So now that Elllis has published a sequel to it, I thought I'd start by re-reading the first book, since much like John Self notes in his review of Imperial...

Siegfried Lenz, A Minute's Silence (Schweigeminute,2008 ) It's a tragedy: Stella Petersen, a young woman, an English teacher at a high school in northern Germany, has died. The school holds a memorial service, and one by one they step up to give their eulogies: the principal, other teachers...

Nam Le, The Boat (2008) Not to take anything away from Stewart or this forum, but the phrase "world literature" always bugged me. While it sounds broad enough, it's often used to mean "all that other literature that's not written in my country and/or the US/UK", often with the added implication...

I thought this article was interesting. Obvious, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless. Walking the tightrope between translation and interpretation | Sarah Ardizzone | Books | guardian.co.uk

Aravind Adiga: Between The Assassinations (2008) I haven't read Adiga's Booker-winning debut novel The White Tiger (yet, I should add). However, I've recently read at least two Indian novels - Farahad Zama's The Marriage Bureau for Rich People and Vikas Swarup's Q&A - that try to present the...