Author: professorwu

  • As we move forward to 2017, please allow us a somewhat self-indulgent post looking back on some of our highlights from the year gone by. After all, 2016 hasn’t been the best year for many around the world – with seismic political events like Brexit and Donald Trump ‘winning’ the US election, along with the…

  •   Parties! The opportunity to kiss strangers! Unrelenting fun and endless bonhomie! It is the last day of the year – a time to remember the year just past, make resolutions, plan for the year ahead and, perhaps, have fun over an alcoholic beverage or two. Fireworks may or may not be involved. Yet so…

  • Since he exploded onto the literary scene in 2007 with the publication of his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz has won countless honours and accolades. Along with the Pulitzer Prize, his novel topped a 2015 literary critics’ list of the best 21st century novels (so far). Yet there are…

  • With the average Briton set to spend over half their monthly wage packet on Christmas this year, and their American cousins set to spend a similar amount, there’s a good bet a significant amount of this money will be spent on what some may term “tat”. Of course, we’d hesitate before using the term to…

  •   Every year in November, the lovers of literature hold their breath as they await news of the winner of one of the most notorious ‘booby’ prizes in the world: the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Founded in 1993 by the Literary Review, the award causes titular delight among its hordes of fans, and has developed…

  • ‘There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work,’ so says renown author Maggie O’Farrel. Writing in The Guardian, she says that “the idea that there is a typical ‘writing day’ makes me laugh”. Here at Nothing…

  • Think you know what it takes to become the next Picasso or Monet? Think again!   There are 5000 shades of white – and they all have specific names that are usually unheard of. The most common shades are codswallop and bumdergard. Wild easels make the best artistic companions, but they must be caught first.…

  • For all artists, there has long been a struggle between creative expression and meaning. Particularly for writers, there is a curious difficulty often in ‘choosing the right words’. This is because, as the post-modern critics and theorists like Derrida and Lacan argue, the meaning of words depends on their context. Yet we never understand contexts…

  • There has been much debate in recent years regarding the future of bookselling, and whether the online retail industry can – or will – replace traditional bricks and mortar bookstores you find on the physical high street. While we can’t yet answer this question, we can tell you a little about the ways in which…

  • The best new indie books of 2016

    In a year that began with a spate of celebrity deaths including David Bowie and Alan Rickman, and ended with the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency after taking us via both Brexit and the news that the planet has now passed through the ‘carbon threshold’, there have been precious few things for…