John Baker’s Blog

A taster:
I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that on Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derison, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that [...]

At the Electronic Book Review Brian McHale has a new essay on postmodernism. He extracts quotations from Raymond Federman’s novel, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, of which the following is one.
So you find my novel too postmodern, wrong again Gaston, you’ve arrived too late, we are already beyond postmodernism, it’s dead, dead and gone, don’t you know, [...]

Henryk Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. He is best known for his epic historical novel Quo Vadis, which depicts the persecutions of the early Christians. There have been a couple of film adaptations of the novel, a Hollywood version in 1951 and another from Poland in 2001.
Sienkiewicz was born in [...]