Chris Mitchell This is one book you can judge by the cover. It shows a home snapped portrait of Cookie Mueller laughing, her head thrown back and her hand out against the wall for support. Ask Dr Mueller is three hundred pages of that laughter, gathered together from over 25 years worth of her writing […]
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine
Jason Weaver Before his passport read ‘novelist’, Michael Bracewell learnt his trade on the first rush of British style magazines. Much of Bracewell’s work from the mid-’80s could be found in Arena, sibling to The Face but with a considerably higher brow. Sadly, the magazine got crushed in the publishing stampede that has instead brought […]
Julian Rathbone: Intimacy
Naomi Delap I feel sorry for writers these days. It’s so terribly difficult to be iconoclastic, what with the Irvine Welsh backlash just about to break and that sinking feeling you get whenever blurb describes anything as remotely Tarantinoesque. There are no new subjects to write about, and any attempt at novelty eventually and inevitably […]
Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2
Adam Baron Richard Powers’ fictional hero (also titled Richard Powers) returns from years in the Netherlands to the University that gave him his love of Literature. The author of four novels, Powers is to be the Humanist in residence in the newly built cognitive science centre, a labyrinth of laboratories and computer networks. Powers does […]
Quentin Crisp: Resident Alien: The New York Diaries
Chris Mitchell As camp as Christmas and twice as sparkly, Mr. Quentin Crisp makes his literary return with Resident Alien. Featuring selections from his diaries between 1990 to 1994, Resident Alien describes the hectic social whirl of one “who is in the profession of being.” Never refusing an invitation, Quentin lives a life in which […]
Andrei Codrescu: The Blood Countess
Adam Baron When I was teaching English in the Slovak Republic a few years ago, I was told the story of Elizabeth Bathory, “the blood sucking Countess of Cahtice,” a town in Slovakia which used to be part of Hungary. Countess Elizabeth, in a bizarre twist to the droit de seigneur, was alleged to have […]
Mary Zuravleff: The Frequency Of Souls
Naomi Delap The Grand Affaire is ever the stuff great fiction is made of. Revelling in the cathartic effect of our protagonist’s roller-coaster ride of emotion, we gasp as the first illicit coupling finally takes place, groan as the inevitable disillusionment sets in, heave a sigh of pleasurable anguish when the tale ends in an […]
Patricia Morrisroe: Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography
Nick Clapson Robert Mapplethorpe has long been a contentious figure in the art world, with much of this debate focusing on whether or not his erotic/homoerotic photographs trespass the boundaries of pornography. This is a matter which becomes especially prejudiced by the fact that they often deal with the difficult subject of gay sadomasochism. Much […]
Iain Sinclair: Conductors Of Chaos
Chris Mitchell Poetry, far more than fiction, is a difficult one to discuss. One reader’s revulsion is another’s revelation. So at first sight I thought Conductors of Chaos would be right up SPIKE’s alley (as it were) due to Picador billing it as the collection which Faber & Faber dare not publish. Cool! I thought. […]
Marcus Gray: It Crawled From The South: An R.E.M. Companion
Chris Mitchell This is the second edition of Marcus Gray’s definitive encyclopaedic guide to R.E.M., one of the few intelligent bands capable of regularly packing stadiums. Conceived as a comprehensive reference source for the diehard R.E.M. fan rather than the usual sycophantic rawk biography, It Crawled from The South features self- contained and cross-referenced chapters […]
Irvine Welsh: Ecstasy: Three Chemical Romances
Chris Mitchell With the phenomenal success of Trainspotting (in all its various literary, filmic and dramatic guises), Irvine Welsh has moved from semi-literary obscurity to the centre of contemporary English writing. Trainspotting was one of those books that provoked people who hated reading to devour its three-hundred plus pages. This never happened with Martin Amis. […]
