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I love synthesizers, electronica, minimalist and ambient music: Mike Oldfield, Vangelis, Brian Eno, M83, Philip Glass, Jean Michel Jarre, Sigur Ros, are some of the artists I love listening to.

So what is the contemporary poetry that you have been reading?

I believe what he wrote in a famous essay is that political speech was unethical because it contained gross lies, not because it brainwashed people. Any conversation around the office's coffe machine will show people's growing dissatisfaction with politicians comes from seeing right through...

Damn it, I missed the day L'Ingenu and A Simple Heart came out :sad: Anyway, today I got: Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino The Nonexistent Knight, Italo Calvino

My first Grass book. I loved it, never read anything this good by him again. The descriptions of the kids growing up during that summer, their adventures, their thoughts, it was a beautiful experience.

No movie adaptation could do justice to Wuthering Heights.

I found this novella a pretty uneven work. The first part, the long, , aimless, spiteful monologue, is delicious. Then Dostoevsky tries to create a plot in the second part and it all goes to hell. Dostoevsky's short fiction usually disappoints me: A Weak Heart, The Double, The Little Hero, I...

Bookstores. Once a month. Three weeks Either they interest me for their plot, or a friend or a writer I like recommends them. No. More than 50, less than 100. I bought most of them on bookstores. Yes. No. I put them on shelves and sometimes reread them.

I don't know exactly which novel initiated my enthusiasm for fantasy and science-fiction, but the combined readings of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne and H. G. Welles in my youth were certainly the foundation of my love for these genres.

This reminds me of a girl in college who was annoyed I told her innocent:

Hm, fantasy is Conan, sword and sorcery, dungeons and dragons; now what I wonder is what Conan novel did you read that made you think it's juvenile stuff. You must be talking about the cartoons.

I read the novel in Portuguese: a lot of Buzzati's work has been been translated here in the past few years. I discovered him three years ago when I was studying Italian; since then I've been reading everything I can by him. He's a marvellous writer. Having the novel fresh in my head, I'm...

Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo receives an assignment to the old Bastiani Fortress, on the frontier, where the desert starts and goes on for miles until disappearing inside a thick mist. Young Drogo is disheartened because he yearns for military glory, for the romantic death on the battlefield, and...

Scores, the music from movies, constitutes something like 80% of what I listen to every day. I can't stand lyrics myself, I figure they're second-rate poems, and in the end what I really want is pure sound. So film scores are the closest to my ideal of music. I love peaceful, meditative sounds...

I'm in the Tartar steppe, about to spend the rest of my life in a Fortress waiting for the enemy army to arrive.

Well, Rilke probably lived for poetry, but I think his lonely method only worked for him. In his Memoirs, Pablo Neruda described himself as a lively man who loved the contact with people and wrote poetry irregularly, amidst travels across the world, political manifestations and public readings...

In this novel Casares returns to the topics of time and memory that made The Invention of Morel such a fascinating experience. It’s 1927 and Emilio Gauna, a lowlife mechanic from Buenos Aires wins a thousand pesos at the horse tracks: being young and having no responsibilities, family or love...

The ‘Father Brown’ stories must constitute the most unusual collection of detective fiction yet written. The mysteries G.K. Chesterton builds are some of the most whimsical, surreal, absurd, unlikely crimes ever imagined, which defy logical solution. And yet what is most incredible is that they...

In this short novella Italo Svevo introduces us to Mario Samigli, a 60-year-old country writer who considers himself a literary master for having written and self-published a novel in his twenties that no one has really read. Poor Mario dreams of having his novel published outside Italy and...

In 1902 an aspiring poet named Franz Kappus sent a letter to his idol, Rainer Maria Rilke, asking him to evaluate some of his poetry. In the course of this relationship Rilke would send ten letters to Kappus, which the young poet collected and published after Rilke's death. In these letters...