Elberry finds historian Anna Reid successfully managing a difficult balancing act in her new book about the seige of Leningrad, which killed four times as many people as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined... "When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics" (Stalin to Churchill at Teheran) And the opening ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Elberry
The Possessed is the uncategorisable hit 'memoir' by friend of The Dabbler Elif Batumann. Brit reviewed it here and Elif herself contributed a guest Dabble here. Now Elberry offers his review... This is a pleasing, deceptively readable book, fairly accurately subtitled "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them". It is a ... Read More...
Elberry reads "a well-informed, intelligent, and judicious book" but instinctively disagrees with its author... My stepfather once said: "I hate cities. I don't much like towns, either." He's lived most of his life in a village in West Yorkshire, and worked as a bus driver for a good twenty years. He ... Read More...
A novel entitled The Third Reich was discovered among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death in 2003, and has only recently been published in book form. Elberry tries to get to grips with it... Bolaño is a vexing writer. He is generally hailed as a great genius, and even in translation ... Read More...
'For the sake of thoroughness he proceeded to electrocute his genitals'... Elberry enters the world of the mad scientist... So the world never found out how savannah chimps would respond to the sight of a live leopard rolling down a hill towards them in a wire-mesh ball. This is the kind of ... Read More...
Elberry reads an illuminating biography of a 'cocky, mordant, determined' playwright... Ben Jonson had the misfortune to be a late 16th Century English playwright. Who would read one of Jonson's diligently allegorical plays if he could read Hamlet or King Lear? Certainly, at first glance Jonson seems a lumbering, uninteresting writer, ... Read More...
Elberry puzzles over a 'novel in dramatic form' from the author of No Country for Old Men and The Road... Here is a puzzling thing. McCarthy, who is generally known for harrowing tales of bloodshed and mutilation, has written a play starring a ex-crim and a suicidal professor, sitting at a ... Read More...
Elberry puffs his way through a new and much-hyped short story collection... Short stories, like poems, are easy to write, and like poems they are usually worthless. Brevity tempts the would-be writer - easier to write a 5,000-word short story than a 100,000 word novel; and brevity makes the poem and ... Read More...
Elberry enjoys an "unnervingly lucid" mix of horror and comedy... This is an extremely funny book about booze, bars, violence, and horrible sex. Not new subjects but then how many could there be, in the 21st Century? In any case, deWitt's manner is so peculiar, so arresting, he seems to exist ... Read More...
We've been marking the launch of occasional Dabbler Bryan Appleyard's new book The Brain is Wider than the Sky with a mini-Appleyardfest (read Brit's review here and an exclusive Q&A with the author here). To conclude it, here's Elberry on the human imagination... Signed copy competition winners - congratulations to Dabbler ... Read More...
