Ted Mahsun

Read an excerpt from Michael Moorcock's latest book, LOVERS: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A Personal Memoir over at Enter the Octopus .

The Guardian has one of the first reviews for Haruki Murakami's latest, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running , up online and is written by Alastair Campbell. The Times meanwhile, has helpfully put up an article telling us the Top Ten things we need to know about Murakami , for those who haven't already. MG Harris, owes her published book to reading Haruki Murakami ...and is now all fangirl about him: ...I do know what reading Murakami did for me and it’s nothing less than this: it enabled me to write a publishable novel. I’ve written before about the day I met several publishers who were interested in acquiring ‘The Joshua Files’. And one of them commented “We can’t believe this is your first novel!” to which I replied (laughing) - “Well it’s not - it’s my first publishable novel. I’ve written three before this.” “So what happened,” they asked, “between writing the other three and writing Joshua Files?” So I told them the truth. In the meantime I’d read almos...

TIME Magazine is asking from readers what questions to ask Haruki Murakami in an upcoming interview .

Not that there's any surprise in it but Midnight's Children is Booker of Bookers . Again. I approve. If you haven't read it yet, do so and you may not regret it. And if you haven't finished it, why not? (btw, I read Satanic Verses last month and it was over-rated.)

Was a bit surprised to hear that Tom Disch killed himself on the Fourth of July . For those not in the know, Disch was a reknowned SF writer but he was most often overlooked and under-read. Even I haven't read his acclaimed books, Camp Concentration and The Genocides , mostly because they're hard to find. But I did read his non-fiction book about SF, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of and it was a blast. Ironically, he's just had a book out, The Word of God , in which Disch writes as God. I guess embracing divinity was just too much for him.