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The eighteenth century romance novel tradition with its lush descriptions of landscapes and settings is just one of the many threads Raphaël Jerusalmy weaves into a novel which features the 15th century French poet and rogue Francois Villon, a real-life figure with a shadowy...

— Book Sexy Review, Oct 26 2015

Ballad of the Hanged Men by François Villon, (translated by Richard Wilbur) O brother men who after us remain, Do not look coldly on the scene you view, For if you pity wretchedness and pain, God will the more incline to pity you. You see us hang here, half a dozen...

— Lizzy's Literary Life, May 5 2015

Reaching back to the tumultuous 15th century, Jerusalmy chronicles a fictional tale of real-life brigand/poet François Villon, dispatched to find The Brotherhood of Book Hunters. Jerusalmy’s dense and erudite narrative begins in Paris. Villon has been imprisoned...

— Sep 13 2014

You’ve heard of a ‘selfie’: David Cameron crops up in them a lot with Danish PMs, or snoozing behind sisters-in-law. Well a ‘shelfie’ – apparently – is the bookish equivalent of this narcissistic phenomenon: it is a picture of your bookshelves and the term...

— Jan 15 2014

Saving Mozart purports to be the diary of one Otto J Steiner, a tubercular music critic dying in a Vienna sanatorium on the eve of the second world war. Abandoned by his son, Steiner coughs and curses his way through his final days. He seems apathetic about the war’s progress...

— Dec 20 2013

Writers do not often attempt the epistolary form, and the reasons seem obvious: All action happens at a temporal distance, summary narration often seems unavoidable, and—depending on the audience for whom the epistles are written—exposition can sound forced. Imagine, for...

— Dec 12 2013