There are countless overlooked books that deserve greater recognition - and many of them can be snapped up for a penny online. Here Nige recommends a classic novella... Janet Loxley Lewis was the wife of the eminent critic Yvor Winters, and a considerable poet and novelist in her own right. The Wife of ... Read More...
Novels
Today we suggest you seek out the works of the representative of a long-lost tribe - many of them available for a mere penny on the web... Despite being prolific and successful, (twice winner of the Whitbread, winner of the Heywood Hill lifetime achievement prize et cetera), Jane Gardam is not ... Read More...
When two of Frank's heroes collide, great art is made... I was a teenage Samuel Beckett fan. I owed my early enthusiasm to my English teacher, Richard Shone, who taught me between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, through my O and A Levels. He encouraged me to read widely outside ... Read More...
Nige revisits Beckett's first novel - 'very Irish, very clever', and prefiguring the great works that came after.. His troubles had begun early. To go back no farther than the vagitus. It had not been the proper A of international concert pitch, with 435 double vibrations per second, but the double ... Read More...
I think every English teacher I ever had must have mentioned this book at some point, but I had never got round to finding out anything more about it, until now... Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E" is a novel written in 1939 by Ernest ... Read More...
ZMKC enjoys a modern classic, available for a penny on Amazon.... I think I may be the last person in the world not to have read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Indeed, it is possible that the only reason the book is actually available for 1p on Amazon is that the market for it ... Read More...
Jessica Warner, in Craze : Gin And Debauchery In An Age Of Reason (2003) provides what she claims is a complete list of victims of spontaneous human combustion in literature from 1798 to 1893. The narrator’s father in Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown (1798) William the Testy in Knickerbocker’s History Of New ... Read More...
Nige pays tribute to the exceptional unreadability of the originator of "It was a dark and stormy night"... Edward Bulwer-Lytton, born in 1803, was a hugely successful novelist in his day, now all but forgotten and unread, remembered only for incidentals. He coined the phrases 'the Great Unwashed' and 'the almighty dollar' ... Read More...
This exclusive extract from the Spring 2013 issue of Slightly Foxed quarterly is by Dabbler editor Andrew Nixon, and looks at the dark appeal and extraordinary publication history of J.P. Donleavy's cult novel The Ginger Man... ‘This’, said my father, handing me a battered paperback, ‘is the sort of book that ... Read More...
Jonathon reviews Terence Blacker's new novel - and contemplates the role of rats in fiction... These are the primary stereotypes with which slang burdens the rat. All are negative, none may be observed in the actual animal. They are, as should be apparent, the characteristics of human beings. Those, in every ... Read More...
