Steve Mitchelmore

Camera Obscura From Spain’s most celebrated author, an inventive, quietly radical novel that explores how books illuminate our livesIn Camera Obscura, Enrique Vila-Matas ...

Just as I finish Montevideo, news of another Vila-Matas novel in translation. @yalebooks.bsky.social coming to the rescue again. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

A measure of forever For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.             Amina Cain When TS Eliot read Dante for the first time, he noted a discrepan...

I posted this a year ago today. One of the best things on my blog, I like to think. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-me...

Anything McBride and/or Collard recommend, I avoid.

In Flight: Kafka, Fiction & Reality - Jewish Literary Foundation Gabriel Josipovici joins Jewish Chronicle chief fiction reviewer David Herman to explore the interplay of fact, imagination, and flight.

jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/events/in-fl...

Webinaires | Espace Maurice Blanchot En mars 2024, le site Espace Maurice Blanchot a initié un webinaire qui, à raison de trois ou quatre fois par an, rassemble plusieurs intervenants autour d’une thématique donnée. Nous sommes heureux d...

Some 'webinars' on Blanchot in French, but autotranslate is available of course. blanchot.fr

39 Books: Introducing a blog series In 1985, I read two books. The following year I read a lot more, and it was then I began to keep a list of each book I finished. I've kept t...

Someone in the Atlanta, Georgia area viewed the entirety of my 39 Books series. It would be so nice if they had commented...just once. this-space.blogspot.com/2024/04/39-b...

This isn't the usual novel-author interview, which is why I wrote a little about it. this-space.blogspot.com/2026/02/tran...

I've no idea about the company, but I use it ahead of any other bookseller.

My wishlist includes a book that's £80, so I wouldn't want anyone to see it and think I wanted them to spend that on me. (It's a new book about Blanchot; they're all that price.)

On a Blackwell's wishlist, which can't be made public.

Typo in the title: 'a Women' should be 'a Woman'.

Statcounter has a new bot-excluding feature, so I'm not longer getting 100s of visits a day from Singapore.

Howard the Duck?

Reading Vila-Matas' Montevideo, I realise it should be me giving out all the major book awards.

Being There - In Venezuela - Craig Murray I have now been in Caracas for 48 hours and the contrast between what I have seen, and what I had read in the mainstream media, could not be more stark. I drove right through Caracas, from the airport...

"Pretty well everything that I have read by western journalists which can be immediately checked – checkpoints, armed political gangs, climate of fear, shortages of food and goods – turns out to be an absolute lie. I did not know this before I came." www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/202...

Try not to approach FQs like a robber looking at a bank vault. Think of them as "the narrative of a person talking to himself at four o'clock in the morning" as Gabriel Josipovici recommends. They'll communicate before being understood, as Eliot said of Dante's Commedia.

Mehr Nichts: <i>Alice</i> by Judith Hermann In his essay for the TLS, Tim Parks wonders what kind of literature will reach the international public after “what is now an industriali...

Here's my review of the former. this-space.blogspot.com/2011/07/mehr...

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann In this deeply affecting English-language debut, German writer Hermann reflects on the connections between art and experience, d...

@publisherswkly.bsky.social You refer to Judith Hermann's novel as a "deeply affecting English-language debut". This will be news to those who read translations of 'Alice' 15 years ago, not to speak of 'Summerhouse, Later', and 'Letti Park'. www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619510

I have a German edition Ereignisse (with a CD of Bernhard reading the 'events') which hasn't (as far as I know) been translated.

Just arrived in the post. Translated by @shirtysleeves.bsky.social I doubt there is more of Bernhard left to translate.

This reminds me of Chomsky's response to Vaclav Havel's speech to Congress. chomsky.info/19900301/ and Craig Murray's blog about this reporter.

Spotlight on … Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (1955) – DC's The blog of author Dennis Cooper

This is a little bizarre. Dennis Cooper quotes the entirety of a blog post of mine from 2017. I've read one of his novels – The Sluts. Do any of you have an opinion on his work?
denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on...

Short review: HUGELY enjoyable.

I've just got an email saying it's on its way. At bleedin' last.

I've been locked out of my X account after the connected email was changed, and not by me. So I'll be here for the foreseeable. Probably good for the soul.

Just a note: Dalya Bilu translated Badenheim 1939. David R. Godine was the US publisher. You can just see its logo in this image of his best novel.

Interview with Lars Iyer (Part 1) | European Graduate School Podcast

This is very entertaining.
shows.acast.com/egs-podcast/...

Didn't finish Mac & His Problem, but still glad someone's still prepared to publish a translation. Yale UP in this case, oddly. yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...

Stephen Mitchelmore is Continuing to write the "legendary" literary blog In the 20 years of writing This Space, I have neither used advertising nor asked for support, but AI has wiped out my source of income, so please consider buying me a book (even contributing to a tiny

Either someone, a group of people, or a bot from Singapore has been visiting multiple pages of my blog every day for weeks now. I hope they notice this link at some point. buymeacoffee.com/thisspace

End of year post A year of limited reading. Three books stood out: Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind , Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio , and W...

An end of year post entitled 'End of year post'. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/12/end-...

How Gaza Broke the Art World • EQUATOR The former editor of Artforum, fired in the wake of 7 October, reckons with two years of division, fear and silence

"I think that Klaus is not speaking so much as parroting the senescent propaganda of Staatsräson, the version of history that floats undisturbed through the technocratic ventilation systems, a malevolent spirit seeking new host bodies." www.equator.org/articles/how...