“…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…”
Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush: Hurricane Julie
Ben Granger collides with Julie Burchill over several bottles of wine to seek out the dreadful truth on chavs, Stalin, Ariel Sharon and Morrissey “Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint” runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancastrian abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest shit-stirring iconic hack of our […]
Will Self : Feeding Frenzy : Biting The Hand That Feeds
Chris Hall serves up a slice of Will Self with the publication of his second collection of journalism, Feeding Frenzy Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of your new son, Luther. Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now. CH: So […]
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
Stephen Mitchelmore (Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car crash on 14th December 2001). In its official press release, the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature praised VS Naipaul, the 2001 recipient, for "works that compel us to see the presence of […]
Will Self : Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys : Pre-Millennium Tension
Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist No other author in recent years has divided the critics with such relish as Will Self. With, three novellas and two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, he has established himself […]
JG Ballard: Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course In The Fiction Of JG Ballard
Chris Hall gives a crash course in the fiction of JG Ballard Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of JG Ballard’s fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the […]
Will Self : Great Apes : Self Destruction
Chris Mitchell finds out why Will Self doesn’t give a monkeys Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “mile high club”. Unless you were in a apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general election, (or living in another country), you can’t have failed to have seen […]
The Significance Of Names In The Fiction Of Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Will Self, Umberto Eco : Waiting For Go.Dot
Chris Hall on the significance of names in fiction and film The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name ‘Godot’ is missing from any parental ‘Book Of Names’ (although […]
