Eugene Byrne Leo Marks crops up in the oddest corners of the 20th century. The only son of doting Jewish parents, his father owned the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, made famous by Helene Hanff’s book. Marks read his Freud (who once visited the shop), wrote a lot of stories and produced the brilliant/notorious […]
Joyce Maynard – At Home In The World
Bethan Roberts In the last couple of years there has been a shift in confessional writing from the craze for tortured self-absorption (from Elizabeth Wurtzel and Andrea Ashworth, amongst others) to the impulse to torture a friend/relative/lover, preferably a famous one. Joyce Maynard’s book, along with the du Pre siblings’ A Genius in the Family […]
Michael Marshall Smith – Spares
Antony Johnston They say never judge a book by its cover, but the sheer ubiquitousness of Spares (with its oh-so-cool spot-varnished, blurry-type cover) inclined me to think it was the sort of bestselling “new fiction” which generally leaves me cold. Fortunately for me, a friend had already read it and liked it so much that […]
Kevin Kelly – New Rules For The New Economy
Chris Mitchell Despite its dry title, Kevin Kelly’s book isn’t just another self-styled business bible for the information age. Instead, it’s an overview of what he terms the “network economy”, which is not only superseding the old paradigms of the industrial economy but transforming how we live. The network economy has been brought about by […]
Charles Leadbeater: Living On Thin Air
Chris Mitchell Thanks to the globalising effect of new technologies, Britain is transforming from an industrialised economy to a knowledge based economy. Unlike previous generations, many of us make our livings not by producing anything tangible but through the absorption and analysis of information. This, maintains Charles Leadbeater, is the advent of a new economy […]
Mark Taplin: Open Lands: Travels Through Russia’s Once Forbidden Places
Gary Marshall During the Cold War huge areas of Russia were strictly off-limits to foreign visitors and, in classic tit-for-tat style, Russian visitors were allowed entry to the USA provided their travels didn’t take them anywhere there were roads, people or small animals. In 1992 both superpowers signed the “Open Lands” agreement (from which Mark […]
Susan Maushart: The Mask Of Motherhood
Bethan Roberts Often witty and certainly subversive, The Mask of Motherhood is, as the blurb puts it, not a ‘how to’ book but a ‘how it really is’ book. I’m not sure what this cliché actually means (how it is for who, exactly?), but it’s true that Maushart quickly gets to work, debunking all the […]
Ed Jones: This Is Pop
Gary Marshall It wasn’t a rock gig, it was an event. Journalists from all the major music papers were there, and even the local newspaper had marked the event with a special supplement. Celebrities air-kissed backstage, and the band took the stage in front of thousands of people. For Wigan musician Ed Jones, the gig […]
John Steele: The Bird That Never Flew
Stephen Harper The Bird That Never Flew is a crude but extraordinary autobiography. With a minimum of literary fuss, John Steele describes his unimaginably brutal life, which began in the gritty Glasgow estates of Carntyne and Garthamlock, continued in remand homes and approved schools, and culminated in stretches in the infamous "big houses" of Barlinnie […]
Meera Syal: Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Bethan Roberts It’s a relief to find that once you get beyond the mouthful of a title, this second novel from the fantastically talented author of Anita and Me, Bhaji on the Beach and star of the rightly acclaimed BBC2 comedy series Goodness Gracious Me more than lives up to Meera Syal’s reputation. It tells […]
Jane and Anna Campion: Holy Smoke
Chris Mitchell Holy Smoke is the novel of Jane Campion’s soon to be released film, starring Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel. It’s an odd project, not only for being published before the film’s release (which says something about the literary pretensions of the director), but also for being a collaboration between two sisters. Challenging the […]
Salman Rushdie: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Tim Parks ‘I always thought storytelling was like juggling,’ says the main character in Rushdie’s novel Haroun, ‘You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you’re good you don’t drop any.’ In his new work, The Ground Beneath her Feet the Anglo-Indian author duly tosses […]
John Baxter: George Lucas: A Biography
Chris Mitchell Throughout his film-making career, George Lucas has continually pushed back the boundaries of technology in order to realise his ideas on the silver screen. John Baxter’s biography of the man is not only an account of Lucas’ personal history but also the transformative effect Lucas’ fascination with technology has had on the entire […]
The Onion: Our Dumb Century: Max Cannon: Red Meat
Gary Marshall damages his health laughing at The Onion’s Our Dumb Century and Max Cannon’s Red Meat According to popular belief, the phrase “American humour” belongs in the same oxymoronic category as “military intelligence” and “virtually spotless”. We British take great delight in reminding Americans that they have no sense of irony – not because […]
N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics
Björn Wiman “I am Human”, cries the protagonist in Will Self’s novel Great Apes. A phrase that may sound like a sturdy truism, in Self’s novel rings heavily: the protagonist has waken one morning only to find all human beings transmogrified into chimpanzees. The reader and the protagonist are both kept in the same suspense: […]
Barry Gifford: The Sinoloa Story
Jayne Margetts There is always beauty in violence, particularly when the written word is the vernacular. There are many kinds of perpetrators who wield the pen with the expertise of a dominatrix whipping her victim into submission; from James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard to the once savage and brutal Bret Easton Ellis (in his American […]
Alan Weisman: Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
Thomas Handy Loon Colombia’s Gaviotas is a community only dreamers could visualize, and only outcasts could build. Surrounded by rebel-infested llanos (savannas) and vast coca plantations, the presence of its peaceful rhythms and homegrown technologies is as hopeful as it is unlikely. A super- efficient pump fills water cisterns every time children play on the […]
Emily Jenkins: Tongue First: Adventures In Physical Culture
Jayne Margetts It’s no secret that the thought of wading through another chapter and verse of literary cultural dissection usually holds about as much appeal as taking a skinny dip in a bath full of female pythons with PMT. After all, how many book store shelves are stocked with feminist rant and rave from the […]
Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us
Antony Johnston One of Us. A powerful phrase — belonging, kinship, camaraderie. Familiar concepts, though this book deals with them in ways you may not expect. Initially our protagonist, Hap Thompson, seems anything but One of Us. An outsider, a loner with no life, an ex-wife, forced to live in exile from his hometown. The […]
Erik Davis: TechGnosis
Chris Mitchell It’s traditional to think of technology as the epitomy of rationalism, functioning with the mechanical precision of mathematical logic and mindlessly performing laboursaving tasks for its human creators. But Erik Davis argues that the use of technology within our lives has managed to generate a whole new mindset of myths and mysticism which […]
Leon Wieseltier: Kaddish
Stephen Mitchelmore It is a commonplace that anyone brought up within a religious tradition and who has subsequently rejected it finds that its legacy runs deep. It is also a commonplace that the rejection often takes the form of the vacated space. It still seeks out the comforts of belief, even if it is a […]
Bruce Sterling: Distraction
Chris Mitchell If the novel of ideas has found a refuge within the 20th century, it’s within science fiction. Sci-fi lends itself perfectly to complex speculation about the future and what’s in store for the human race. The only problem is, sci-fi novels tend to function on such galactic-spanning levels that characters get reduced to […]
Peter Körte, Georg Seesslen: Joel And Ethan Coen
Gary Marshall The Coen brothers are responsible for some of the most impressive feats of cinematic lunacy in recent years, from the slapstick of Raising Arizona to the pastiche of The Hudsucker Proxy, and this book is the first attempt at highbrow analysis of their films to date. Although the profusion of photographs and widely-spaced […]
Magnus Mills: All Quiet On The Orient Express
Gary Marshall Magnus Mills’ first novel, The Restraint Of Beasts, uncovered the sinister underbelly of rural England, as a team of feckless fencers found themselves drawn into a Kafkaesque nightmare. In All Quiet On The Orient Express, Mills tells the tale of an innocent holidaymaker who, erm, finds himself drawn into a Kafkaesque nightmare that […]
Paul Gootenberg: Cocaine: Global Histories
Gary Marshall The story of cocaine is a depressingly familiar one. Like many of the drugs now banned, it was originally hailed as a groundbreaking new chemical and was manufactured entirely legally throughout the world. People claimed it could treat all kinds of illnesses, presumably because the patients were too whacked off their gourds to […]
