James Purdon
Pen Pals
Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011
By Paul Auster & J M Coetzee
Faber & Faber/Harvill Secker 248pp £20 order from our bookshop
There’s always something slightly uncomfortable about reading other people’s mail, though we’re happy to relax the taboo if the correspondents are famous enough, even more if they’re safely posthumous. It isn’t often that we’re invited to read letters between living writers, which makes Here and Now something of a novelty: a near-current record of correspondence between two major contemporary authors over a three-year period.
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'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire