Motoko Rich very kindly mentions this site — and a number of other blogs, including TEV, Bookslut, and Syntax of Things — in her New York Times article on the unfortunate disappearance of newspaper book reviews like the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s. Maud Newton, who has been writing a literary blog since 2002, said she has the freedom to follow obsessions . . .
Today a novel set in a barren Rome would be seen as science fiction, but in 100 years this kind of setting could be a reality. See also: new apocalyptic stories.
Roman vomitoriums, despite Huxley’s depiction, weren’t really rooms for regurgitating while feasting.
Marcelo Ballvé argues that Bolaño was above all a chronicler of Latin America’s dashed utopias, of the “scarred and defeated veterans of the hemisphere’s dirty wars.”
Saki produced “strange, hilarious, black-hearted stories that came out of the decadence and facetiousness that the late Victorians loved and then hated in Oscar Wilde.”