June 2008 Archives

Like every year for almost fifty years now, Tom and Kate spend summer at their lakeside house somewhere in Maine. Tom, a retired Greek professor, is a cranky old man who can't handle aging well. Kate, on the other hand, embraces it with grace and humor...

A writer who dedicated all his energy to his novels and poetry falls in love during a literary symposium. Not knowing how to seduce the woman of his dreams, he starts writing her the story of his youth. When he was a young man full of hope...

After his partner's death, Alain permanently stopped taking photos. Yet twenty years later, he agrees to dig out his old camera for a weekend in Rome with his mistress. And he takes every photo she asks for...

Today this blog celebrates its second birthday. Two whole years. Two years of encounters, exchanges, surprises and discoveries. In two years, this blog and I have had ups and downs, moments when we almost broke up and tender reconciliations...

I discovered Svetislav Basara through his Mongolian Guide, a burlesque and unhinged account of a communist regime's decay. So it was with great pleasure that I reconnected with him thanks to the Babelio Critical Mass operation...

Who hasn't dreamed on a night of doubt about leaving for the edge of the world, far away, somewhere else, to escape life's troubles and the dull routine of everyday existence? "You hear the name, you repeat it in your head, you close your eyes. If it's snowing today, if it's raining..."

Sébastien Lesquettes is an old man whose children have stored him away in a retirement home like they'd discard a useless piece of furniture. For three and a half years, the one nicknamed "Einstein" in his "old age inn" has been waiting...

Maria Thereza von Paradis is the daughter of a counselor to the Empress of Austria. At age three, she was struck by blindness as sudden as it was permanent. From this darkness, she adapted by dedicating all her energy to music...

This is the story of a recipe. Irina received this recipe as a gift on her wedding day, on the eve of a long journey to the colony of Batunda, with a husband she hadn't chosen. This exile, which was only supposed to last as long as the war...

Honestly, if this novel hadn't been part of the Biblioblog Prize selection, I don't know if I would've read it. There's something about putting these two words together - "shop" and "suicides" - that deeply bothers me. But I did...