Late September: the tourists have abandoned the beaches, and only a few resolute locals and French day-trippers can be found on a Sunday at Colera’s platja dels morts, where we spend a delightful couple of hours reading and… Read More
Posted on September 28, 2015 by richardgwyn
The first Borges story I ever read was ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in the translation by Alastair Reid, while living in a derelict shepherd’s hut on a Cretan hillside. A couple of years later, like so many others… Read More
Posted on September 26, 2015 by richardgwyn
Alastair Reid, Andrés Neuman, Angharad Price, Augusto Monterroso, Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Halfon, Fiction Fiesta, Francesca Rhydderch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, García Márquez, Inés Garland, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Juan Villoro, Julio Cortázar, Latin America, Mario Vargas Llosa, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Orbis Tertius, Owen Sheers, Pedro Serrano, Tlön, translation, Uqbar, W.N. Herbert, Wales PEN Cymru
Since I began teaching creative writing, some fifteen years ago, I have become accustomed to the sad refrain from younger writers that although they fervently wish to write – or perhaps ‘become a writer’, which may or may… Read More
Posted on September 21, 2015 by richardgwyn
When you go in search of dolmens, or megalithic tombs, they are not necessarily where you last remember seeing them. If you remember them at all. This one never was so far, nor the path so steep, nor… Read More
Posted on September 15, 2015 by richardgwyn
Or how long should a piece of writing be? Reflecting on this, in relation to a piece I am working on, I haphazardly check into an article in The New Yorker and am reminded by John McPhee that… Read More
Posted on September 13, 2015 by richardgwyn
I have taken my time reading the Paris Stories of Mavis Gallant, which is what she would have liked. But coming to the end of the book (in the elegant NYRB edition with Gallant’s own afterword) I am left… Read More
Posted on September 9, 2015 by richardgwyn
There was a time when a beach was simply a beach. You took your clothes off, and if you were so inclined donned a bathing costume (or swimming suit) and splashed around in the sea. Upon exiting the… Read More
Posted on September 3, 2015 by richardgwyn
I have had Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work on my reading list for a while, particularly as some of the better critics have sung his praises (for example James Wood, writing in The New Yorker, or Boyd Tonkin, in… Read More
Posted on September 1, 2015 by richardgwyn
Ricardo Blanco’s BlogRichard Gwyn is the author of Ricardo Blanco's Blog
