The Second Circle

f.a.q.

1. What is the Second Circle?

A. The Second Circle is a guide to contemporary literature, following the careers and work of the best writers around the world today. Each author is profiled and one of their books singled out for particular recommendation.
       Besides reviews we feature interviews: click here for an interview with Jim Crace. You can also sign up for our new reviews and announcements periodical, THE CIRCULAR. There is no charge and your address will be kept private. 

2. Why "Second Circle"?

A. The quote on the main page comes from Dante's Inferno, Canto V, Lines 130-131. The place is Hell, the division you can guess, and the speaker is Francesca, avid believer in the joys of a good book. Here's her story as she tells it:

"There is no greater pain
   than to remember, in our present grief,
   past happiness (as well your teacher knows)!

But if your great desire is to learn
   the very root of such a love as ours,
   I shall tell you, but in words of flowing tears.

One day we read, to pass the time away,
  of Lancelot, how he had fallen in love;
   we were alone, innocent of suspicion.

Time and again our eyes were brought together
   by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.
   To the moment of one line alone we yielded:

it was when we read about those longed-for lips
   now being kissed by such a famous lover,
   that this one (who shall never leave my side)

then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did.
   Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it.
   That day we read no further."

[Dante, Inferno V,  121-138. Translated by Mark Musa, Penguin Books].

So read on, ye fallen; the Second Circle awaits you.

3. I'd like to help support this site: what can I do?

A. You can make a payment from as little as $1 to as much as $50 using the good offices of Amazon.com. They can process your credit card and protect your privacy. They take a small cut and pass the rest onto us. We've never made a profit so any money you give will serve to defray our running costs. And thank you for asking.
   The Second Circle donation page is at amazon.com/paypage/P2YZAM84H7VW58

4. Why do you concentrate so much on fiction--and full-length fiction at that?

A. Our answer to this is usually that long fiction, for one reason and another, suffers by being reviewed alongside history, memoirs, poems, and reissues (or fresh translations) of older fiction. The names of contemporary novelists, beyond the reading club and book prize regulars, are largely unknown to the general reader and quite inscrutable on the contents page of, say, the New York Times Book Review: unlike poets and memoirists the revelations of novelists are unascribable, unlike historians and biographers they piggy-back on nobody else's achievments or view of the world, and unlike the vast majority of short-story writers they have plunged their fingers deep into the muck of creation, casting aside the fetishization of style and local effect for harder-won trophies.
   Besides, few of the many websites out there devoted to literature, high or low, pay any attention to the work of living--and often under- nourished--novelists the work of whom these same people will be crowing about in fifty years time. There are latter-day Prousts and Dostoevskys out there: our task is to make it somewhat easier to find them.