Words on a Page

  Let me start off by saying that I love Cormac McCarthy , and at the time of his death last summer I'd read all but his last two novels, ThePassenger and Stella Maris (which at the time were only available in hardback). I love his use of archaic, biblical and inventive language as well as the demands he puts on his readers—you don’t turn to McCarthy for an easy, straightforward read. His novels deal with complex themes (Love, Death, Violence, the nature of Good and Evil, and the nature of God), and you get the sense that McCarthy, himself, is grappling for understanding of both the world he has been cast into and the worlds he has created. The Passenge r is no different—in fact, in many ways, it is even more challenging for its lack of a traditional narrative structure: a beginning, a middle and an ending. On the surface, T he Passenger feels familiar. It feels like genre fiction . When Bobby Western and a fellow salvage diver investigate a small plane that has crashed in th...

Fairlight Books will be publishing the latest four titles in its Fairlight Moderns list of literary novellas over the summer – mine, included – and during the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of getting acquainted with the other three authors. In the first of my series of interviews, I speak to Douglas Bruton , whose novella Blue Postcards will be published on 8th July.   ~ Loree:   I’m always interested in where writers get their ideas. For me, I often start with a nugget of information from a newspaper or a book. Just something that intrigues me and starts me asking questions. And before I know it, a story starts to build in my head. Your novella  Blue Postcards is set in Paris in the 1950s, right? Why Paris? Why the 1950s? How did the story come about? Douglas:   As part of the research I did for another piece of writing (a short story) I came across Yves Klein’s ‘A Leap into the Void’. I thought it was such a fabulous lie. That led me to IKB (In...