…despite its considerable size, Patrick Humphries’ attempt to delve into Waits’ life only just manages to scrape beneath the surface…”
Matt Ruff: Bad Monkeys
“…the ending almost certainly won’t be what you expect, and it will either convince you that Bad Monkeys is a wonderful tour-de-force, or make you regret having spent so many hours reading it…
Dan Rhodes: Gold
“…across all of Rhodes’s books, short fiction or novels, there’s a strong vein of humour closely entwined with brutality and tragedy…”
Contact Spike Magazine
Please note: From February 2012, Spike Magazine is on hiatus. SpikeMagazine.com is a website about books, culture and ideas. Spike has been online since 1995 and, thanks to a small army of contributors, has hundreds of features, reviews, and interviews with writers, artists and musicians. There is a complete list of Spike contributors and their […]
Spike Contributors
Regular Contributors: Trent Aitken-Smith Dolly Delightly Thryza Nichols Goodeve Kevin Fitzgerald Vanessa Libertad Garcia Ben Granger Jeanette Hewitt Jacob Knowles-Smith Russell Mardell Chris Mitchell Tsering Norbu Robert O’Connor Jonathan Reynolds Sourav Roy Eric Saeger Kes Seymour Joseph R. Spencer Maria Beatrice Tonini Jason Weaver Mary-Claire Wilson Chris Wood Vanessa Zainzinger If you wish to get […]
Francis Ellen : The Samplist
“…its appeal will be limited to those like a good fart joke to round off a discussion on Bach as the composer’s composer…” Ian Hocking The Samplist – Francis Ellen See all books byFrancis Ellen at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Mr Francis Ellen, author of The Samplist, has been ruffling the feathers of the literati – […]
Abby Lee: Girl With A One Track Mind
“…it’s about time that a different – non-sexist, non-passive, progressive female – perspective on sexuality broke though into the mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better…”
Tony Wilson: F4 Records: Fourth Time Lucky
Craig Johnson hears Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson on the rebirth of his record label, the upcoming Joy Division film, how he accidentally created Frankie Goes To Hollywood and why photographer Kevin Cummings is a miserable twat. ‘Wilson ya wanker!’ is a statement that has been bandied around Northern England for thirty years now. The […]
Berlin, Bromley – Bertie Marshall
Bertie Marshall provides a sneak preview of his own punk memoir documenting his suburban transformation into Berlin Berlin, Bromley – Bertie Marshall See all books by Bertie Marshall at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com THREE PIECE SUITE. A fading Polaroid of the twilight world, of a London suburb. It’s net curtains, privet hedges, Pebbledash, Fishmongers and draylon […]
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
Ian Hocking In the deepest American South, Addie Bundren lies on her deathbed. She was a powerful woman. Her family have gathered to watch her die. All but one: outside, working to the last ticks of Addie’s clock, her son, Cash, renders her coffin. When at last she dies, it falls to her family to […]
Anthony Bourdain: A Cook’s Tour: Eat The World
Jayne Margetts on Anthony Bourdain’s quest to eat the most gastronomically dangerous dishes on the planet I love my authors a tad on the fresh, petulant and carnal side. A splatter of blood-and-guts-style reportage only heightens the pleasure, as do tales of human squalor and degradation. I can hack romance, but only in staccato style, […]
Tenement Sonata #2 – Lisa Stopless
My upstairs neighbors inspired me. Heard ’em packing up. Getting out. Rent’s late. Work’s slow. They’re fast. Heard ceiling scrape in dream. Woke up. Dark, still dressed. Head full. Power off. Milk lumpy. Sluggish panic. Man, this bites. Towel moldy. Called Devon. Collect. Sold the car. Sold the ounce of weed in the car. Sold […]
The Sugar Mummy: Bertie Marshall
Psychoboys is set in the cities of Moscow and Berlin. It tells the story of Rez, a rent boy living on the streets, and his fight for survival in a world of bizarre strangers. He meets a riot of characters – Ms Thing, a transvestite sugar mummy who educates him in the art of coprophilia […]
The Basquiat File
Robert Knafo In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, […]
X20: Richard Beard
SPIKE presents an exclusive extract from this hilarious cigarette obsessed debut novel DAY 1 DR WILLIAM BARCLAY, born 7 March 1936, died 3 March 1994, age 57. Mysterium Magnum. The principle of all generation is separation, he used to say. Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands. He said that the […]
Brian Patten: The Minister For Exams
When I was a child I sat an exam. The test was so simple There was no way I could fail. Q1. Describe the taste of the moon. It tastes like Creation I wrote, it has the flavour of starlight. Q2. What colour is Love? Love is the colour of the water a man lost […]
Brian Patten: Armada
Long, long ago when everything I was told was believable and the little I knew was less limited than now, I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond and to the far bank launched a child’s armada. hidA broken fortress of twigs, the paper-tissue sails of galleons, the waterlogged branches of submarines – […]
Son Of G, 1993 (after Allen Ginsberg’s Howl)
Annalise Bomenblit I saw the best minds of our generation silent before a fluorescent light that screamed like the rainbow sky of the drowned man’s last memory who tried to fight it with pilgrimages at night to food and other scarce suburban treasures speaking of things they bought and things to buy and things to […]
