Magnificent Octopus

She had to admit the sight was stunning, though. There were squat ships and circular ships, brightly coloured ships and severe black, white ...

So with morning coffee I read chapter thirteen, about Julius stopping at a bank machine and freezing on his PIN, trying and thinking and jus...

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the ra...

Finnish is weird. It's not related to very many other languages, and it's relatively highly inflected — 15 noun cases and moods tha...

This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banish...

There's a long, strong tradition of the bande dessinée — bédé or BD for short — in the French language. It's so much more than Ti...

A learnt language is just a mask, a form of borrowed identity; it should be approached with appropriate aloofness, and its speaker should ne...

The winners of this year's Best Translated Book Award were announced last Friday, with the fiction award going to Wiesław Myśliwski...

"Human beings have ways of thinking about human beings that we have not." Had Giskard been human, the remark might have been made ...

When I clicked on the lamp, I saw she was still in her dress and her face looked blurry like someone had tried to erase it. And her mouth wa...

Basically, as far as Madame Thouret was concerned it was a disgraceful thing to get oneself murdered in an alleyway off the Boulevard Saint...

Joyce Carol Oates was awarded this year's Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix. I read one of her novels for the first ti...

I want to fuck you , is one of the things in the letter. Also, I am in love with you . Isn't language amazing? I can't get over ...

Circumstances conspired against it. The damp cold on its own might've kept me home with a book and a blanket, but Earth Day manifestatio...

This afternoon at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, a dozen or so people (of which I was one) sat in on a discussion panel with author...

Esi Edugyan is the author of Half Blood Blues . Her second novel, it won the 2011 Giller Prize and was a finalist for several other awards...

I'd planned to see Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez this evening at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival , but the event has been ...

This evening I attended Blue Metropolis Literary Festival event Crime Writing: Hot Art and Montreal . Joshua Knelman, author of Hot Art: C...

There were phrases of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the c...

Four blacks slid the coffin into the too-shallow hole. They used hoes to rake the dirt over it. The idea that one day he might also be int...