Word: novelizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...final figure was Émile Moreau of the Banque de France. The others were bankers, but he was a civil servant. He was the mayor of his little town for 35 years, and that captures his character - a rural Frenchman, he could have come out of a novel by Flaubert. Insular, xenophobic, he refused to learn English and believed, somewhat justifiably, that international finance was an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy designed to exclude France...
...Foreigners have also run afoul of Thailand's lèse-majesté laws. Recently accused expatriates include an Australian teacher whose novel referenced a fictional wayward prince, and the BBC's Thailand-based correspondent whose online pieces described the role of the monarchy within Thai politics. Both cases have prompted an outcry from international human-rights organizations. "By trying to protect the King's image, the government is actually doing it harm, and in some cases the charge of lèse-majesté has been entirely inappropriate and unjustified," said media watchdog Reporters Without Borders...
...possible for a foreign male to visit Thailand without getting a) waylaid in a girlie bar, or b) arrested? This question struck me recently in Phuket, where the best-selling titles at the airport bookshop included a self-published novel about a murdered Thai prostitute, an exposé of the country's sex industry and two memoirs by foreigners who had served time in Thai jails - a genre already as overcrowded as the prisons themselves. That Singapore publisher Monsoon Books feels there is room for one more - Nightmare in Bangkok by Andy Botts - begs two more questions...
...always be men like Botts who are fooled by the country's freewheeling reputation and corrupt police force into thinking that smuggling out heroin in cans of shaving foam is a sensible way to earn a living. The second question is tougher. But apart from Alex Garland's classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren Fellows' account of life in Bang Kwang Central Prison) and Forget You Had A Daughter (by British smuggler Sandra Gregory). Wherever...
...productive writer-in-residence programs looks set to flourish. One current inmate said to be writing his story is suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout. One that I hope will do the same is Harry Nicolaides, an Australian arrested for supposedly insulting Thailand's crown prince in a self-published novel called Verisimilitude that sold only seven copies. Already famous for turning criminals into writers, is Thailand now turning writers into criminals? Now that's worth writing a book about...