I've collected quite a few back-issues of this little quarterly which I subscribe to, just so I'll always have one on hand between the new releases, because I enjoy the articles on often (but not always) out of print books, the small format on lovely cream paper, and the small woodcuts so much. Favourites in this issue were articles on Graham Greene's [Stamboul Train], one of his 'entertainments', which he wrote when he was in need of money and was intended as a commercial book with film potential. Its great appeal, it seems, lies in its characters, and in Green's refusal to give the reader the ending he or she might expect, which was his way of not 'selling out' completely.

A pleasant surprise was an article on L'Abbé François Prévost's Manon Lescaut (1731), a book which, until last summer had only been known to me for it's title as an opera, but which I discovered and quite fell in love with when it was featured in a Coursera online course called "The Fiction of Relationship". What I found interesting is that the book itself was originally written by a Benedictine monk, and it was ostensibly intended to condemn too much emphasis on passionate love and lack of moderation, though of course those are the very things that make the story such great reading even today. As an added twist, the article was also written by a Catholic priest, though there is not the slightest soupçon of condemnation or disapproval, even when reading between the lines.

Some of my all-time favourite books are featured, such as Rogue Male, one of the great spy/survival books of all time which I discovered this year and intend to reread more than once, as well all Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Among the riches also, an article on the books of Barry Unsworth who won the Booker Prize with Sacred Hunger in 1992 (which tied with The English Patient that year). Though I've had his travel memoir Crete on the tbr for several years, I discovered Unsworth last year with his excellent Morality Play (highly recommended), and have since acquired several of his novels. He was a first-class historical fiction writer, and reading about him in one of my favourite bookish publications of course only served to strengthen my resolve to eventually read everything this author has published. ( )