Aleksander Hemon - "Love & Obstacles"

There's a new Hemon on the way, a collection of interlinked short stories apparently similar in tone to "The Question of Bruno" (still my favourite of his books, I think). You can read the title story of the collection in The New Yorker, or check his new website here.

Question: can you ever get bored or frustrated with being compared to Nabokov and Conrad, or does it feel creamy and good every single time?

Susan Tomaselli - Books of the Year

Not six degrees of separation (there are only five), more a nod to Ariel Manto's 'Free Association' column (though not as clever), my favourite reads of 2008 happened in a sequence; that is, one book lead me to another. Only two of the books on the list are new, as in published this 2008, but they are important as they restored my faith that the year wasn't a dead loss; perhaps publishing isn't totally fucked? These six books were a good run: from the new Nabokov, to the old Nabokov, to the pretend Nabokov, to a different type of word [virus] master, to the new junky on the block, my "fiction" books of 2008 are:

The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon, always different, always the same >> The Enchanter, Vladimir Nabokov, the original of Lolita & read in anticipation of his new one >> Novel with Cocaine, M. Ageyev, "decadent and disgusting," said Nabokov >> Junky, William Burroughs, his finest >> Down and Out on Murder Mile, Tony O'Neill, always good for a quote Sebastian Horsley nails it when he says "a well-written life is almost as rare as a well spent one. And what a life..It is a map of hell with directions showing his readers exactly how to get there."

Susan Tomaselli lives in Dublin, is the editor of Dogmatika, and is a
contributing editor to 3:AM Magazine.

The Irresistible Rise of Roberto Bolaño

A sneak preview of Roberto Bolaño's poetry in translation is available here. It's taken from the collection that New Directions are publishing at the beginning of November. The American edition of the English translation of "2666" follows at the end of the month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with the UK version traipsing in from Picador next January. I can only hope that Picador bother to print it properly. I recently bought "The Lazarus Project" by Aleksandar Hemon in hardback and it looks like they bashed it out on a dot matrix printer that was a little low on ink. If you're going to ask people to spend fifteen or sixteen quid, surely you should make some kind of effort?

Quote of the Day

"Forever stuck in moral mediocrity, I could afford myself neither self-righteousness nor orgasmic existence" - Aleksander Hemon, "The Lazarus Project".