Dr David Stephen Calonne has written and edited a number of books around Beat-era American literature with a particular focus on Charles Bukowski. The recent collection More Notes of a Dirty Old Man will soon be followed by an appraisal for Reaktion’s Critical Lives series. With a James Franco adaptation of Ham on Rye in […]
TV Eye: BBC Fours’s All American season
Jacob Knowles-Smith sits down for a TV dinner with Tom Wolfe Thankfully BBC Four hasn’t been demolished just yet. If it had been, we wouldn’t have had chance to enjoy its recent ‘All American’ season. They say that BBC 2 would absorb the channel’s role, but doubtless this would come with – if not dumbing-down […]
100 Artists’ Manifestos – From the Futurists to the Stuckists: Selected by Alex Danchev
Reviewed by Ben Granger 1. The purpose of politics is to inspire art. The only useful thing it has ever achieved When Marshall Brennan argued “The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power… It is the first great modernist work of art”, he referred specifically to The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. While the […]
Infinite Jest: An Interview with Richard Herring
For comedy aficionados, Richard Herring needs no introduction. So we’re not going to give him one. Declan Tan asks the questions What is it you strive for in your shows? Mainly to make people laugh, but along with that I suppose my main goal is doing so in an original way and hopefully also producing […]
Gerald Locklin: An Interview
Gerald Locklin has, in his lengthy career, alternately been called a “people’s writer”, a “stand-up poet” (co-credited for coining the term) and, by his friend and contemporary, Charles Bukowski: “one of the great undiscovered talents of our time”. In a fascinating interview, Declan Tan hears about the influence of comic books, the giants of modernism […]
All Experience Devolves To Gratitude: Dan Fante
Carrying the torch passed on by Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr, for many Dan Fante is America’s most vital writer. Interview by Declan Tan Dan Fante is one of the last surviving writers of his generation that could be called a “maverick”. Having spent years in his own personal wilderness, and never touching a typewriter, […]
Ballard in Shanghai
Chris Hall revisits J.G. Ballard’s childhood and finds the future in the past The opening of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) has young Jim watching British war propaganda films with fellow choristers in the crypt of the Holy Trinity church in Shanghai, which was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built in the […]
Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas
Published a few years before the works that made him a posthumous literary superstar, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas is an evasive, hybrid beast. Ben Granger gets to grips with it This arcane curiosity of a book – first published in Roberto Bolaño’s native Chile a few years before more his more famous […]
Sweeping Narratives: Joan Didion
Kevin Fitzgerald gathers together the narrative fragments of Didion’s novels and finds that identity is a collaborative process In her essay ‘Facing Reality’, Marilynne Robinson likens our present model of the world to so much ‘floorsweep’ – the meagre skimmings from a hundred years’ worth of economics, history, technology merged into a seamless narrative. It […]
Ralph Steadman: Today’s Pig Is Tomorrow’s Bacon
Gonzo scribbler, internet entrepreneur and backing vocalist for Eliza Carthy, Ralph Steadman spills the beans on being ripped off and Hunter S. Thompson’s mother. Chris Wood listens. “I felt savaged a bit by the whole thing… Hunter was in the middle of institutionalising his mother at the time, for her drinking. Great lady, by the […]
Kafka’s Other Trial
Perhaps Josef K will get to testify in the ongoing wrangle over Kafka’s manuscripts in an Israeli court. The Czech author instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy his papers, instead two-thirds eventually made its way to the Bodleian Library via Kafka’s niece. The remainder ended up, after Brod’s death in 1968, with Esther Hoffe. […]
Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s LA Bus Tour
Take a ride on the wild side with Esotouric’s tours of LA’s underbelly “We’re not your ordinary tour company,” suggests the website of Los Angeles-based Esotouric. Indeed. Rather than curb crawling around Laurel Canyon squinting at George Clooney’s house through binoculars, Richard Schave and Kim Cooper offer tours the rest of us want to see. […]
Leader: The Group Mind and Collaborative Communities
Jason Weaver goes in search of the creative city and loses himself in the collective mind Where does creative work originate? Anybody who has worked collaboratively can tell you about the mysterious processes at play. The excitement and flow of a creative project appears psychic at times. When things are going well, serendipity seems predestined. […]
Structure and subatomics: Don DeLillo, Underworld and the new historical novel
Jason Weaver revisits Don DeLillo’s premillennial opus of paranoia and baseball. The title of Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld alludes both to living under the canopy of the bomb and to a world beneath us, more specifically a hell. DeLillo has publicly stated that he wanted to write about the ‘secret’ history of the Cold […]
Philosophy in Rags: The Individual: Houellebecq and Gnosticism
Hugh Graham concludes his exploration of Houellebecq’s dessicated terrain with the Stoic imperative to “bear up and do without”. PART THREE: THE INDIVIDUAL Every revival of philosophy begins with the individual. Today the individual, lulled by pop wisdom and popular culture, has little awareness of what it means to be one’s self outside of cultural […]
Philosophy in Rags: The Present Augustan Age: Houellebecq and Gnosticism
In the second of three parts, Hugh Graham examines the theme of atomization in Houellebecq’s novels, finding bad conscience in good intentions and fatal contradictions in the biometrics of happiness. PART TWO: THE PRESENT AUGUSTAN AGE A desert landscape flattened by positivism, by the belief that everything begins and ends in mechanics, forces and particles, […]
Philosophy in Rags: Rigour for a Dying World: Houellebecq and Gnosticism
In the first of three parts, Hugh Graham looks through the prism of Houellebecq’s novels and finds a Gnostic theme for our times. Deserts creep and sea-levels rise. Populations expand and resources are depleted amid poverty, wealth, and intractable war. Under these lowering skies it seems astonishing that we live in a world void of […]
Wyndham Lewis’ Blast: An Explosive Journal
Ben Granger First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centuries, when the Great British reading public scanned the covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their thoughts on […]
Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings
Ben Granger Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like “Funes the Memorious”, “The Library of Babel” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Borges explores the […]
Chuck Palahniuk – Snuff
Dan Coxon Over the last few years Chuck Palahniuk has revelled in the sordid, the grotesque, and the downright dirty like a particularly literate pig in shit, and for many readers his decision to set a novel within the pornography industry must have seemed like a marriage made in Heaven, or at least the more […]
The Literary and Political Catholicism of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh
Michael Palin – Himalaya interview
Ian Rankin – A Question of Blood interview
Martin Amis – House Of Meetings
“…Any new Martin Amis book always comes with plenty of baggage, and House Of Meetings is no exception. As his first full-length fiction since 2003’s Yellow Dog, it comes complete with high expectations and the ugly face of his previous achievements leering over its shoulder. You can almost hear the critics sharpening their knives even before it hits the shelves…”
Douglas Coupland: The Gum Thief
“…Relating the relatively humdrum tale of two ‘associates’ in a Staples stationary superstore, it often sounds like a soap opera rather than the latest offering from one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing voices. The Gum Thief’s relatively mundane surface hides an intriguing study of the epistolary form – and a commentary on the nature of the novel itself. “