Antonio Muñoz Molina – Like a Fading Shadow

Ray is there blundering in and out of flophouses and trying to find passage to Africa. He pores over spy novels ‘where the brand of everything the characters carry or use is detailed’ (as well as autohypnosis manuals, and the adverts in Life magazine). They are both living in fantasy worlds, with ‘that delirious belief… that real […]

Juan Villoro – The Reef

Juan Villoro’s first work of fiction to be translated into English, The Guilty (2015), features seven short stories narrated by seven middle-aged men. The men are all very tired: jaded, often reduced by past or dormant addictions, or physically injured in ways both mundane and dramatic (a past-it journeyman footballer’s “body isn’t normal, it’s a kicked-in lump”, […]

2 Books by César Aira

The Proof, written in 1989, opens with a nerdy 16-year-old girl walking at dusk down a city street thronged with other teenagers. Marcia feels herself slowing down ‘through the soft resistance of the light and darkness, silence and the glances exchanged between face and face’. Suddenly, she is crudely accosted by two lesbian ‘punks’. The […]

Trump Juice

Disclaimer: What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblances or references found within it to actual people, places or events are wholly fictitious. (This is no way to imply that Donald J. Trump, who over the past 30 years has taken out, on average, one lawsuit a week, understands or cares about the difference […]

Trump’s Action Movies

In Hollywood action movies the good guy always wins, and America always wins. How they win varies; why they win is seldom questioned: they are, therefore they win. For the past year, Donald Trump has been running a campaign for president on the same principles: Donald Trump always wins, therefore he will win the election; when […]

Roberto Bolaño – A Little Lumpen Novelita

The scene is Rome, at some unspecified time towards the end of the 20th century. A cry of ‘Fascism or barbarism!’ is occasionally heard from passing cars. ‘Economic conditions were deteriorating…. Something was wrong in Europe or Italy, I think. Or Rome. Or our neighbourhood.’ Written near the end of his life, this was the […]

Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings

There are many more than seven killings in this ironically titled novel — in fact very long — that starts off set in the Kingston, Jamaica, of the 1970s, amid an efflorescence of political violence. The two major parties, the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party and the left-wing People’s National Party, were pouring guns into West […]