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 ...
There is a small collection of books that nearly everyone of a certain age has read by virtue of them being on the GCSE English reading list – Of Mice ...
The follow up to 2008’s acclaimed Submarine, Joe Dunthorne’s second novel, Wild Abandon, takes as its focus a number of odd yet endearingly flawed characters practicing, in their words, “secular ...
It’s puzzling whether it is even morally justifiable to read Kurt Cobain’s journals. Publishers appeared to have marketed the book with a disturbing “suicide chic” campaign. The identity of the ...
Jane Struthers’ Red Sky at Night is a delightful compendium of countryside wisdom. Filled with fascinating facts, it covers such things as predicting the weather prediction, reading tea leaves and everything ...
Moving and bitterly sweet, The Hand That First Held Mine is Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel and winner of the 2010 Costa novel award. Exposing the fragile nature of our human ...
