Literary genres

"A pretentious stand-up comedian and an outrageous social commentator," says Victor Patrascan in his self-inflicted satire.

Ljubljana – Slovenia having switched to e-vignettes on 1 February, the motorway company DARS has so far sold 748,800 e-vignettes, 91% of them annual. It has checked more than 100,000 vehicles to find over 5,000 suspected violations. In 1,356 of them the suspicion has been confirmed and the rest are yet to be checked.

Greek police say a motorcyclist is being treated with non-life-threatening injuries after a man who suffered a fatal fall off a highway flyover hit his passing motorcycle, causing him to lose balance and crash.

Nearly 30,000 vehicles were inspected by the National Toll Administration during the holidays from 25 April to 29 April for a paid vignette fee. 1,400 violators were detected, with more than half of them being foreigners, said the press office of the Road Infrastructure Agency.

Some words seem to grow in usage all of a sudden, like weeds, even in intellectual fields where they have no business. "Narrative" is one such word. Regardless of its meaning, what matters in its prevalence in public discourse now is the style and quality that its users believe it lends their proclamations.

Along with Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie was the central figure of British detective fiction: legendary detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were products of her exceptional imagination.

Istanbul's Pera Palace Hotel Jumeirah is hosting the "Black Week" event in honor of the 125th anniversary of the birth of popular novelist Agatha Christie's birth, featuring a week of crime fiction-themed events.

The festival, which will continue until Oct 24, will include panel discussions at the historic hotel with local and international detective novelists.