Millions of women and men know the name of Ponce Pilate and his role in the condemnation and cruxification of Jesus-Christ . But apart from that, little is known of this Roman governor who administered the kingdom of Judea from 26 until 36.

Jean-Pierre Lemonon , an eminent professor and expert of the history of the 1st century, examines archaeological, historical, and biblical sources to draw a portrait of this figure whose existence was definitely proven in 1961 with the excavation of the “Pilate Inscription“. This block of limestone, excavated from the Roman theater near Caesarea, bears a monumental inscription by “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea” to Tiberius Caesar, emperor of Rome.

Link: Ponce Pilate on Wikipedia

Millenium Trigoly - Vol. 1

The “Millennium Trilogy” is a publishing sensation in France, UK and many other European countries (not to mention Sweden the country of the author). It is an epic tale of serial murder and corporate trickery spanning several continents, and addressing the themes of investigative journalism, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the contemporary culture of corruption.

The first volume has been published in English under the title “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” and in French as “Les hommes qui n’aimaient pas les femmes“.

According to amazon.com, the book will be available in the US in September 2008.

The journalist and author Stieg Larsson died suddenly, shortly after delivering the three novels to his publisher. His website provides more biographical information as well as the announcement of a coming movie.

George Perec (1936-1982) was a renowned, prize-winner French writer who could be described as a literary experimentalist. His most famous novel “La Vie mode d’emploi” ( a 600-page text translated into English with the title “Life: A User’s Manual” ) is a complex and masterly crafted tapestry of an apartment building in Paris, and the lives of its inhabitants. It won the “Prix Medicis” in 1978.

As a writer, Perec explored the creative potential of formal rules, anagrams, palindromes, mathematical word games, and other puzzles.

A Void - By George Perec

In 1969 he produced one of the most remarkable illustrations of constrained-writing , “La Disparition”, a 300-page detective novel written without the letter E. This modern and fun story, full of plots and sub-plots is considered one the most impressive lipogrammatic novel of all times. But perhaps even more astounding is the English translation, again with no “e”, achieved by Gilbert Adair in “The Void”, which earned him the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize.

The book opens with this paragraph:

“Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12:20. With a loud and languorous sign Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.”

• Links: “A Void” — Amazon.com link
  A Void(Novel)– Wikipedia entry
  George Perec — Wikipedia entry
  “George Perec: A Life in Words” A biography by David Bellos. Amazon.com entry
  Lipogram — Wikipedia entry
  List of Prix Medicis