Then he’ll be in Aberdeen in May, with other dates to be added. The road goes on forever… Further details of all this kind of thing at the Readings page.

On to international news  - Little Hands Clapping is being launched in Canada any minute now, and it’ll be coming out in (at least) Finnish, Spanish, Danish and Italian. Further news of these translations when they’re imminent.

We’re all off to the airport now, to catch the next plane to Zürich and have a look at the best Dan Rhodes window display ever. Many thanks to Julia and everyone else at Orell Füssli for this – it’s a beauty.

Happy reading.

Hello everyone. This is our second update of the week, so we’ll keep it brief. Here goes:

Dan Rhodes has been announced as the winner of the 2010 E.M. Forster Award.

That’s all for now. Happy reading.

[We've hacked into Rhodes' medical records and can confirm that his neck has since recovered, but he is currently bandaged up, having sliced open the back of his hand in a bizarre gardening accident. The show will go on though - the wound will be on public display at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow at 7.30 this Friday, 12th March. Why not go along and have a look at it?]

Another interview, a Q&A with The List, lives here. At this point Rhodes was going through a rare phase of good health, so he has no excuse for his bad temper and foul mouth. But at least he leavens things with a joke about a pillow, adapted from his 1977 Muppets annual.

On to other news. Rhodes has announced a string of appearances in Oxford on Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th March. His slots are at 3.30 and 7.30 sharp on the Saturday and 1.30 on the Sunday. They’re happening in a tent near the Book Festival’s ticket office and book shop – the tent has something to do with Canongate Books and Highland Park whisky (nice – keep your fingers crossed for a free tasting), and will be easy to spot. Rhodes will be reading different stuff each time, and it’s free – just turn up. Other authors involved include Geoff Dyer and Mari Strachan. This booking means that Rhodes will have visited Oxford twice in his life, bringing the city level with Cambridge in the Oxford and Cambridge Rhodes Race. 2-2, and everything to play for.

Details of this and other events (Glasgow, Laugharne, Aberdeen, more to follow) live over at our Readings page.

And finally… we are delighted to announce that Little Hands Clapping is spending an unprecedented fifth consecutive week in Heat magazine’s Top 10, together with its five star review. What a run.

Happy reading.

In other news, great reviews of Little Hands Clapping continue to flood the media. This time it’s The Spectator: “This book will appeal not only to his numerous current fans, but to pretty much anyone who can stomach a bit of gruesome vulgarity in a love story. And that’s meant to be a compliment. The novel is a remarkable success.”

Well there you are. We’ve added a Spectator-related update to the post below…

And if you’ve not read Little Hands Clapping yet, now’s the time – while it’s still out in a glorious hardback at a NoNeedToWaitForThePaperback price.

Rhodes is currently in training for his reading with Alan Bissett at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow on Friday 12th March. Details here. News has reached us that Rhodes is making the ultimate sacrifice for this event – he is missing a Ken Dodd show in his home town the night before, in order to get an early night and be fresh for the train in the morning. This should silence anyone who doubts his commitment to his craft.

That’s all for now, but to pad things out a bit here is a recent photograph of Rhodes’ back garden. Don’t ask us how we got hold of it.

Happy reading.

Great reviews are still rolling in. Unexpectedly, the Daily Telegraph has come up with a winner: “Disturbing and delightful. This is a crowded, lively book full of kooky flights of tangential fancy and engaging characters racked with unusual problems. Rhodes has devised a neat, dark and well paced plot.”

It’s good to see the Telegraph redeeming itself after their extraordinary coverage of Gold, which won its writer, Lloyd Evans, our now traditional Maggie Gee Award for Unbelievably Stupid Reviewing. This reminded us that it was time to start assembling the award for Little Hands Clapping. The trouble is, the reviews have been so positive that we’ve only found a couple of contenders – at the moment it’s a battle of the generations between some random old hippie and an iPhone-toting Twitter twerp. While both of them have completely failed to understand the book and have written stultifyingly dumb reviews, we’re not sure they have quite plumbed the depths to the point where they are worthy of the award. They certainly aren’t up there with Evans or Gee, or even last time’s wretched runners-up Tom Adair and Claire Alfree. So it’s looking as though the contest is still wide open. Further details here at our Dan Rhodes is disliked by page.

[Update March 2nd - We don't normally take The Spectator, but we bought a copy when they unexpectedly gave Little Hands Clapping a great review, and we were surprised to find an article called Cheapening the Currency, in which, interminably and over an entire page, "Lloyd Evans deplores the monstrous proliferation of arts prizes." Normally we would think an article like this had been written by someone who was bitter because they had never won a prize in their life. But Evans has won a prize (see above), and despite his moaning about award ceremonies, he was only too happy to visit the roof garden of our skyscraper, here in the heart of downtown Taipei, and accept his trophy in a long and lavish ceremony. That said, we can't be 100% sure that the right person turned up - we didn't know his address, so sent his invitation to Lloyd Evans, Plonker, UK. Still, whoever it was seemed to have a nice day.]

In other news, don’t forget to see Rhodes in a spectacular double-header with Alan Bissett at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow on Friday 12th March. Details here.

Happy reading.

First up, there’s been a great review of Little Hands Clapping and Anthropology in The View From Here Magazine. It lives here.

Rhodes has also given them an exclusive interview for their old fashioned print edition. The nice people there are offering absolutely free copies to the first five people to email them at this address, quoting the words “My best friend is in The Beatles”. [You snooze, you lose. The freebies were snapped up in seconds, but you can still buy it]. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to know what kind of tea Rhodes currently favours.

In other news, Rhodes has been getting a mountain of friendly press coverage around the book’s publication. However, we’ve noticed that, like many Great Public Figures, myths are starting to build up around him. We know Rhodes better than he knows himself, and we are able to confidently correct the following well-meaning errors from various features:

1. Rhodes isn’t friends with Douglas Coupland. He did a gig with him in Toronto in 2003, but they didn’t meet. He thinks he’s a smashing writer though, and has recently been overheard recommending Coupland’s The Gum Thief.

2. Rhodes’ wife is not Japanese (nor is she Taiwanese, unfortunately).

3. He used to be a regular at TJ’s Disco, which is in Newport, not Swansea as reported. It was the first place he ever saw the mighty Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, around this era. Other ridiculously wonderful things he is known to have seen there include Chuck Prophet at the time of his Balinese Dancer album, and Eugene Chadbourne & Jimmy Carl Black.

4. Rhodes didn’t announce his retirement after his inclusion on the accursed Granta list. In fact he did the exact opposite – he wrote something for them saying that he was going to keep writing, having in 2001 (two years earlier) announced his decision to stop after three books in order to make sure he never wrote anything ‘mature’. However, Granta blithely spiked his piece and carried on as if it had never been written, printing a bio line about how he had retired – a line which has been bugging him ever since. If you’ve ever wondered why Rhodes comes across as such a curmudgeon in interviews, it’s because he is always asked about Granta, which inevitably sends him into a towering rage (the retirement business is just the tip of the iceberg). If we were him we would politely decline to talk about the subject and move on to the next question, but we aren’t him so what can we do? Anyway, Granta Schmanta.

On that note, have a happy weekend and don’t forget to snap up Little Hands Clapping while it’s still in its dirt cheap hardback format. Buy a dozen.

Happy reading.

In our last update we broke the news that Rhodes’ new book, Little Hands Clapping, had made it to number three in the The Only Chart That Counts – the Heat Magazine Top 10. We were deluged with mail from people around the globe, demanding verification of this. The girls in the graphics department, way down on the 44th-49th floors, have finally got their scanner working again, and here it is:

But was Rhodes able to retain his crown? Is he still in favour at Heat Towers for a second week on the trot? Let’s see:

There he is – still in there at a respectable number five – to match the stars.

Never mind the Times Literary Supplement, this is the kind of critical acclaim that matters. If we didn’t value our long, sleek nails quite so highly we would be biting them to the quick as we waited to see whether Rhodes will make the hat-trick. But instead we’re off to re-read Little Hands Clapping, and we suggest you do the same.

More to follow.

Happy reading.

Since our last update Rhodes has kicked off the 2010 leg of his world tour in spectacular fashion at Blackwell’s in Edinburgh. More readings to come in Glasgow, Laugharne, Aberdeen and back in Edinburgh. Many more TBC. Details are posted on the Readings page as they come in.

In a rare move, Rhodes has allowed Her Majesty’s Press into his home. Read his interview with The Independent on Sunday’s Katy Guest here.

Little Hands Clapping has also reached number three in The Only Chart That Counts – Heat magazine’s Top 10. They’ve given it five stars. Magnificent.

Glowing reviews are still piling up. Rhodes has even made the pages of The Financial Times: “Dan Rhodes has deservedly made a name for himself as an assured comic stylist. [Little Hands Clapping is] an amusing fable about thwarted altruism and good intentions gone askew. It should please cynical idealists and idealistic cynics alike.”

And now we’re off to lie in a darkened room and apply cold compresses to our tender brows as we try to work out the difference between a cynical idealist and an idealistic cynic.

Happy reading.

Reviews are still alarmingly good:

While his contemporaries waste their time scrambling around for the zeitgeist, Rhodes has ploughed his own idiosyncratic furrow, time and again delivering quirky little books of genius, stories that brilliantly marry a perfectly precise prose style, a wonderfully dark comic manner and a heart-mangling dose of pathos… Almost every page of Little Hands Clapping has superb quirks or asides which will have the reader laughing. A sublime, brilliant novel. The Scotsman

While never losing sight of the monstrousness that ensnares his characters, Rhodes remains gloriously, mordantly funny. The Independent

Little Hands Clapping ought to be the book that brings Rhodes out of the “cult favourite” bracket. If the writers behind The League of Gentlemen or The City of Lost Children wanted a piece of tear-jerking Grand Guignol for their next film project, it would be ideal. Indeed, the most moving aspect of the book is not what happens to the characters, but what it does to the reader: reading it is like taking a deep breath into the lungs of your imagination. Scotland on Sunday

In other news, Rhodes has given an interview to Savidge Reads. Click here to find out what people who complain about unhappy endings are invited to do to his sock.

And his interview with The Skinny lives here. Full marks to the interviewer, Keir Hind, for spotting the Les Dawson reference…

We can hear the helicopter dropping off our massive consignment of copies of Little Hands Clapping, so we’re off to the helipad on the roof. More to follow. Happy reading…

The List says  “This is a unique, sparkling story. Dan Rhodes is a writer to treasure. (Five stars)”

Not a bad start.

Rhodes will be surfacing for events in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Laugharne in the coming weeks. More dates to follow – details on our Readings page.

Lovely new editions of Timoleon Vieta Come Home and Anthropology are out this week too – Anthropology is, at last, in a cheap-as-chips pocket edition. Buy it for all your friends.

Happy reading.