In Conversation with Frederic Raphael William Boyd Literature

WILLIAM BOYD: When someone asks you, 'What do you do?' do you reply 'Novelist', or 'Writer', or 'Novelist and screenwriter'? Or something else?

FREDERIC RAPHAEL: I never answer 'screenwriter'. What is vital to me is the capacity to work alone and without having to apply for a licence. Robert Graves (who went to Charterhouse and disliked it almost as much as I did) wrote a book called Occupation: Writer, which will, as they say, do me.

Is there a favourite novel amongst your work? (I'm always asked this question).

I don't spend much time in narcissistic retrospection. I am rather proud of Like Men Betrayed (1970), which Paul Theroux described as 'Proust with machine-guns' (I am almost happy to recall that it also occasioned a reviewer in ... read more

Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton Drop Dead, Bakhtai

Die, Bakhtai, so you can go home, set yourself free.
I know you don't like this game of wars. You think
the stoning would mess up your clothes
and make your little feet dirty; but look at me:
I am still walking, caked in mud and straw,
a small buddha, after the giant ones the Taliban blew up.
You see, the buddhas' graves are still standing,
hollow with the shadow of their shape.
I think they went down in shame for all the sticks,
... read more

MARJORIE PERLOFF, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago).
Marjorie Perloff is concerned with how we read.

In a discussion of the intriguing work of Yoko Tawada, Perloff notes a significant transcription error in Internet versions of a Goethe poem (changing a pronoun's gender) and writes, 'so careless are our usual reading habits...'. This might seem overwrought - it was a typo - but it also seems warranted: Perloff's remarkably attentive readings shed light, linguistic and historical, on all sorts of texts. But at key moments in Unoriginal Genius she uses her forensic skills - and sometimes her own mistakes of transcription and omission - to distort what's in front of her.

In 'One-Way Street', Walter Benjamin writes: 'The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same ... read more