Craft and good writing make this book a hit with many readers. Innovative form and thinking prose set the right words in the right places. The story brings readers an introspective reflection upon death, seen through the lens of a married couple whom it overtakes.The form of the story weaves alon...
My copy of Continent contains the following inscription:For Simon,Christmas 1986All the best for the New Year & any new continents you may take on-There's a signature below it, but it's incomprehensible. The copy in question is a hardback published by William Heinemann in London in 1986, apparent...
Now this is how you write a gripping book.Quarantine is what you might call a novel of ideas. It seeks to give an account of Jesus' forty-day sojourn in the desert and to explain how Christianity (or, if you will, the cult of Christ) came into being. While it's not overly blasphemous, it does pre...
I thought Jim Crace's Being Dead was a phenomenally weird read read, chock o' block with passages of eerie beauty and shivery meditations on mortality. I don't think I "liked it" per se, but I could not get it out of my head. I had never read anything quite like it at the time, and still haven't....
English author, Jim Crace, winner of last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction with Being Dead, brings another novel of a most unique variety. The Devil’s Larder is a collection of sixty-four very short stories, all with one thing in common – food.Here Crace has really stretched...
Have you ever heard of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest? He was an English novelist who was immensely popular during the Victorian period, but is now best remembered for his dramatic, florid language. He coined the famous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night"in h...
And after all the quashing there remains a taleGENESIS may not live up to Jim Crace's monumental peak of writing he reached with BEING DEAD, but I think it deserves much more examination than those who dismiss it as a work of Ego onanism. The very nature of the story of an Actor who struts the st...