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Bookish: IN AN ENGLISH VEIN (6#) -

There's a Literature Festival going on in London.

Not to be outdone, Paris had a Literary offering, too. JS Rafaeli reports from an English-language literary festival in Paris which, he says, was "a resounding success."

"One of the joys of festivals like this is the exposure to stories that one would never usually come across."

:: London Lit Fest :: .....and..... :: Paris Lit Fest ::

* * * * *
# Laura Lippman's Baltimore detective, Tess Monaghan, signs on as bodyguard to a bratty young actress who is working on a Hollywood movie being shot in the city.

Another Thing to Fall is reviewed
by Susanna Yager with a thumbs-up.

# And Jeremy Jehu reviews
some Historical Mysteries there, too.

* * * * *
# Tabloid Tales Tamilesque: Blaft, a new independent publishing house is producing an anthology of Indian "pulp" or genre fiction in English, which includes 17 stories.

"Mad scientists! Desperate housewives! Murderous robots! Scandalous starlets! Sordid, drug-fuelled love affairs!" screams the lurid back cover of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, in the tradition of all those trashy American pulp paperbacks.

:: Reviewed here by
Pradeep Sebastian, who says it's fun.

# And a brief travel memoir of someone who goes in search of the Cairo cafe patronized by the writer Mahfouz.

...