"There is something of the night about A. L. Kennedy," says Rosemary Goring of the Glasgow Herald. And, let me add, something of the Day too. This is a feeble joke: Day is Kennedy's latest novel, a tour de force about a WW2 tail gunner. Other works include Paradise, a descent into alcoholic misery; On Bullfighting, which is just what its title implies; What Becomes, short stories, and one of my long-time favorites, from her or anybody: Night Geometry and The Garscadden Trains, her first col...

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Gabriel Josipovici is an English writer of fascinating, oblique fiction (The Inventory, Mobius the Stripper) and memoir (A Life). I find him interesting not only because of his outstanding work and varied background (France, Egypt, England), but more precisely because of his experiences with English-language publishers as opposed to German ones. I, too, have seen my work better produced, better publicized, and better marketed in German translation than in its mother tongue. Here he describes...
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And as long as we’re on the subject of my youth in Switzerland (well, as long as I am), Expo 64 is one of my fondest memories. It was a Swiss National Fair that, because Switzerland is a kind of miniature world in itself, was also a kind of miniature World’s Fair, with monorails, then much in vogue, and cable cars, a vital part of Swiss culture, and art displays, and hands-on science exhibits; but, being run by the Swiss, it was as charming and lovely and well-maintained as Switzerland it...

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Behind me in the picture is the house in Geneva I grew up in from the age of, approximately, six, to that of not-so-sweet sixteen. The pic was taken by my daughter last June, when we were over there on a kind of recon trip and jaunt down several memory lanes, none more teeming with memories than this one, Chemin Bonvent (Goodwind Lane). I was surprised to find the place still standing, and even more surprised to find it looking almost exactly the same as when I'd last seen it, 36 years ago. E...
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As a follow-up to the crop circle story, and to my reminiscences of the charming Dorset village of Cerne Abbas and its famous giant, here's a snapshot of the old fella, who's known locally as "The Rude Man," for obvious reasons. Although many believe him to be of neolithic origin, there's no mention of him in medieval chronicles, so he may be much younger than that--450 or so, dating to a revival of interest in pagan rituals, oddly coincident with the Reformation, as if the peasantry, confuse...
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What, more crop circles? Aliens, too? God, how I've missed 'em. Well, apparently they're back, according to the Daily Telegraph, which is rapidly becoming the one-stop online shop for UFO phenomena (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5406187/Crop-circle-found-Wiltshire.html.)  It seems that a local off-duty policeman came upon a remarkably intricate crop circle and its perpetrators, three gentlemen from outer space. Thrillingly, the aliens P.C.Plod ran into were tall blon...
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During my first year as a student in Edinburgh I used to slip out of my dormitory room every Thursday night at 9 p.m. and make my way to the administration building, Pollock Hall, a fine neo-Gothic Victorian manse in whose basement there was a television that the great mass of soccer and rugby TV-watchers didn't seem aware of. I would tune the set to BBC2 and with bated breath (there was always the danger of a telltale clattering of footsteps down the stairs, a rugby or soccer match on anothe...
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Let us welcome Herta Müller to the pantheon of the great and not-so-great. Which is she? Time, not literary critics, will tell.
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