First Post; Somerset Maugham biography

Welcome to the first entry of my blog! Hopefully it will become something useful both to me and to others.

I found some literature/criticism blogs: Bookslut
Which led me to read the review of The Bronte Myth on The Washington Post.

And I read a review of the new biography of Somerset Maugham on the New York Times. I won't provide a link because in a few days people will probably have to pay to read it. I will however, excerpt the most interesting paragraph:

Maugham's love of travel, especially to China, Malaya, Borneo, Samoa and Tahiti, brought him a world of new material and even began to define him as a writer -- ''adultery in China, murder in Malaya, suicide in the South Seas,'' as Graham Greene flippantly remarked. ''East of Suez'' (1922), ''The Painted Veil'' (1925) and ''The Casuarina Tree'' (1926) were the results, along with the classic short story ''Rain'' (1921) and ''The Moon and Sixpence'' (1919), Maugham's fascinating fictional exploration of the career of Paul Gauguin and, by wider implication, of the necessary ruthlessness of all artists.

It makes me want to read those various travel novels -- perhaps there will be something interesting on the postcolonial tip in them...

Another blog I have started to read through is Timothy Burke, a friend from the Philadelphia area.