Berlusca at stool

If you’d like to see lots more of these and you’re on Facebook, join the group Brinda con Papi. You won’t regret it.

Warthog

Toop-down

Talking about the kind of odd things logarithms can throw up, the banner ad on my gmail page at the moment offers me a quick link to “Toop Exhumation Services – The most experienced exhumation company in the UK.” As in toop-down, bottom-oop?

Now where did I put my grandfather?

Rainforest fever

I’ve had some pretty weird recommendations from Amazon before but this one takes the biscuit. ‘As someone who has purchased or rated Brideshead Revisited’, I’m now being offered a discount on the new James Kelman. I’m sorry? What next? As someone who rated or purchased Hotel du Lac, I might enjoy 69 Things To Do with A Dead Princess?

PS The links will take you to the Book Depository. Tié!

All hail, all hail

Two interesting news items in the Italian press today. The first says that Freedom House, which evaluates press freedom throughout the world, has classified Italy as ‘partly free’. It’s at 71st place, alongside Benin and Israel, a surprisingly high position given the parlously servile state of most Italian journalism. The other item is a no doubt independent poll on how much Italy adores its tinpot duce Berlusconi. His popularity rating is now at 75%, putting him higher than Obama and approaching the dizzy heights of unquestioning adulation enjoyed by, well, Kim Jong-il. Whose country, coincidentally, also does rather badly in the Freedom House charts.

Author is gobsmacked, over the moon, er

Well, it’s official. Click here for details.

Proper

There’s an interview with Ishiguro in today’s Guardian, during which the interviewer, Decca Aitkenhead, says: “I wonder if some of his (Ishiguro’s) semantic unease stems from a worry about the popular perception of short stories as not quite “proper” literature.” And it struck me that one of the problems of the general reluctance to read short stories – according to Ishiguro, in the same interview, the UK market market for short fiction is a fourth that of novels, though I would have put it lower – isn’t that it’s perceived as not quite proper, but the opposite; that short stories are seen as “literary” in a possibly off-putting way. The popular perception of short stories is that they may be short but they aren’t stories – they’re would-be poems or exercises in style of some kind. When short stories really were popular – in the days of Somerset Maugham and Daphne Du Maurier – their status as literature wasn’t an issue. People read them to see what would happen next. I can’t help wondering, as well, if the fairly high figure for short story sales in the UK that Ishiguro quotes isn’t skewed by the presence of, among other things, Stephen King’s short fiction, which is often, incidentally, far more highly regarded than his longer work.

Artichokes

42022

Well, my plea (see two posts down) has had some effect. Little Monsters is now ranked at 42022 at the Book Depository. Whoever you are, thank you! 

The Moose Show

A very quick post to recommend a book that deserves more than a cursory nod, and I hope to find time in the next few days to nod in more complete fashion. It’s The Moose Show by Matthew Licht, a collection of stories that bowled me over. They’re tough, funny, endlessly surprising, oddly heart-warming. A joy to read. 

The link is to Book Depository. The Moose Show, like Little Monsters, has no sales rank. Yet. I think you know what to do.