Exciting news. New York Magazine reports that Jesse Eisenberg has been cast in a film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella, The Double. Eisenberg is to be directed by Richard Ayoade, known to British audiences for his comedic roles in The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Man to Man with Dean Learner. Ayoade made his
In November 1844, Dostoyevsky finished writing his first story. He confides in Diary of a Writer that he had ‘written nothing before that time’. Having recently finished translating Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, he suddenly felt inspired to write a tale ‘of the same dimensions’. But he was not only prompted by artistic aspirations. In a letter
The title of George Craig’s recent book, Writing Beckett’s Letters, is both playful and paradoxical. And it prompts the question: how can Craig claim to be the author of someone else’s correspondence? The answer is both simple and complicated: Craig is a translator. He has spent the last fifteen years as part of a band
As a pleasant distraction from a busy work schedule, I’ve been reading a recent collection of twenty essays (or are they short stories?) about death. Edited by David Shields and Bradford Murrow, The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death approaches that tall, dark stranger from a variety of perspectives. David Gates opens the series with a
A collection of Beat luminaries: Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert La Vigne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti standing in front of City Lights Bookshop, San Francisco 1956. Courtesy of the Third Coast Festival, here Ferlinghetti takes listeners on an eerie poetic tour of San Francisco.
I’ll never cease to be amazed by the wealth of material freely available on Youtube. I chanced upon the above clip, a nine-minute excerpt from a documentary where a number of Samuel Beckett’s friends and colleagues are interviewed. The first, lengthy part of the clip begins with Jean Martin, who played Lucky in the original
Jason Diamond, who writes for Jewcy, has compiled a list of the greatest Jewish literature of the last 100 years. Some wonderful choices are included, from Paul Auster’s postmodern New York Trilogy to Joseph Heller’s WWII satire, Catch 22, with Kafka, Proust and Salinger dominating the top spots. While the list does not claim to
‘But perhaps there was an answer, using a kind of extreme logic. My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made
While looking for something interesting to read online recently I stumbled across something boring. Namely, Robert McCrum’s Guardian piece on ‘The best boring books’, listing big, grey bricks of supposedly anaesthetic prose. Two modernist novels had been singled out for critique: James Joyce’s notorious Finnegans Wake and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I began to wonder
In July 1995, entrepreneur Jeff Bezos opened a new kind of bookstore. Inspired by recent leaps in modern technology, Amazon.com opened its doors to a different kind of consumer, set to the discordant soundtrack of the 56k modem. The concept followed the familiar principle of the mail-order catalogue, an accessible list of titles and cover
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Margaret Atwood’s landmark science fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Set in the Republic of Gilead, it imagines an alternative America of the near future where pollution has sterilized most of the female population. A class struggle arises for the ownership and dominion over women who remain fertile. The
Rhys Tranter writes the A Piece of Monologue blog. Here is his first collaboration with the Spectator Book Blog. You might be forgiven for considering Don DeLillo’s White Noise as a survival manual for contemporary life. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the novel’s relevance continues as a philosophical checklist of twenty-first century culture. On its