This month's Dabbler Book Club selection was Tim Binding's The Champion. Here, Dabblers Brit and Toby Ash provide contrasting reviews after which Book Club member Audrey provides a tie-breaker... Brit: Money stinks, is the message Tim Binding first appears to want to convey in The Champion. Literally so in this passage. I've come to make ... Read More...
Novels
In the latest post in our series, Daniel Kalder examines the literary efforts of defunct dictator, Saddam Hussein. It proves an unexpected opportunity to explore the intertextuality of man-bear sex. Saddam Hussein's Zabiba and the King was the first book in my library of dictator literature. I got it for Christmas 2004 – after ... Read More...
Our friends at Slightly Foxed (the real readers' quarterly - buy a subscription now!) have once again kindly allowed The Dabbler to dip into its rich archives. In this corker -- originally entitled A Rum Do -- from the Spring 2007 edition (issue 14),author Linda Leatherbarrow looks at W E Bowman's classic ... Read More...
Tender is the Night (available for a penny here) opens on the French Riviera in 1919. Through the eyes of a young film actress called Rosemary – the ‘new cardboard paper doll’ the film world has cut ‘to pass before its empty harlot’s mind’- we observe the apparently charmed lives ... Read More...
My online research suggests that any review of Elif Batuman’s remarkable book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them must open with the reviewer musing on how to categorise it, before settling, uncomfortably, on ‘memoir’. And who am I to blow against the wind? Let’s start with Elif’s ... Read More...
Right, time for this 1p Book Review series to get ambitious. It was Gaw’s recent post on Cockney Cuisine – “lugubrious spoonfuls of silvery eel and golden jelly” and “suck[ing] on the odd piece of protuberant cartilage” that put me in mind of Ulysses, and particularly of our introduction to ... Read More...
Sue Gee is an acclaimed novelist whose books include The Mysteries of Glass and Reading in Bed. Described as ‘poignant, haunting and immensely readable’, Last Fling is her first collection of short stories -- it is published on 19 May 2011 and is available to order from Amazon. Sue Gee's stories are remarkable ... Read More...
Want to get some free books? Fancy yourself as a reviewer? The Champion by Tim Binding has been described as “a brilliant small-town story of Britain's recent past” and a “magnificent social satire” by The Times. It “chronicles the vertiginous period from Thatcher to Blair – years all the more prescient for ... Read More...
Welcome to The Dabbler Book Club! This is your chance to get hold of free books, hand-picked by The Dabbler from the best new releases. It's free to join, is available inside and outside the UK, and every month you'll get the chance to: receive a free copy of the latest book read exclusive posts by authors ... Read More...
Laura Noble is an artist, lecturer, serial blogger & author of The Art of Collecting Photography with primary essays in many photographic monographs & journals. This is her website and her blog is here. When browsing the shelves of a friend's library I was thrilled to find a selection of Japanese ... Read More...
