Bawdy peasant girls performing a bear dance. Masked revelers spinning to the sound of a mariachi band. An accordion-playing polar bear. Collective onion-chopping commiserations to a Jazz accompaniment. The haunting ...
It is 1992 in Buenos Aires and Felipe Félix, a hacker and coke addict, is invited into the topmost room of a business tycoon’s twin tower. It is a room ...
San Miguel is the latest literary offering from the prolific Tom Coraghessan Boyle (14 novels and nine short story collections to date), in which the eponymous island of the novel, ...
This novel is a stylish, audacious and self-assured debut that mercilessly exposes the artistic ego and, in doing so, both ridicules and humanises it. Its wandering and plotless prose might ...
The stories in Adam Marek’s new collection are addictively off-kilter. They explore strange presents and even stranger futures: nano-suits, interspecies cloning, superhero dictators and earthquake-inducing seizures all make an appearance. ...
Early signs of Lawrence Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast are promising, especially if you a judge a book by its embossed cover—and the intricate illustrations contained within its pages—made more potent ...
What are Book Club Reviews? This is a new series of book reviews on Litro. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: book reviews by book clubs in London or ...
Acquired for Development by… is an anthology of journalism, poetry, and short stories about Hackney, a borough which has divided opinion; depending on who you listen to, it’s either a ...
Following the International Alternative Press Festival earlier this month, the publishing collective has just released the second effort from French cartoonist David Ziggy Greene. Where’s North from Here? comprises ten ...
The Messenger is a writer’s book at heart. While the plot is original and amusing, what I enjoyed most was Australian author Markus Zusak’s playful walk along the outermost edge ...
What really changes our way of appreciating and consuming culture, however, is the concept of time, which has changed over the decades. On one end there’s “Tarkovsky-time”, and on the ...
“What is it called when the landscape mirrors the condition of the poor fucks who live in it?“ Ben Marcus is not a novelist but he is trying to be. The ...
A middle-aged man, recently separated from his wife, stands alone on the deck of a North Sea ferry on his way to a walking holiday in Germany. At his hotel, ...
I’ll admit it. The last time I visited Achilles and the Trojan War wasn’t in Homer’s The Iliad; it was in Troy—that golden, glinting Hollywood creation full of brawn and ...
About half way through Stuart Evers’s cinematic debut, If This is Home, it becomes clear that the author has pulled one over us: this is not only an old-fashioned mystery ...
A retrospective of Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and Status Anxiety as a tie-in to Litro #115: Work. Continue Reading Nonfiction: Alain de ...
Why aren’t more short stories about happiness? Writers are a grim bunch, by and large. If there’s a slough of misery they can send their characters into, chances are they ...
There’s an art to ending a short story. A good finish leaves you feeling it was there all along, its signature running through everything like the words in a stick ...
Hemingway is used as a barometer for the manly or literary class. He is everywhere, his name employed as an easy endorsement. In Spain, Cuba, France and the United States ...
“The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the here-and-now. Seize the ...
