Ben Granger The web has done wonders for democratising freedom of expression, with information more easily shared than ever before. When it comes to the old-fashioned medium of books however, a few major publishing houses continue their stranglehold on the market. It’s always good therefore to see a smaller indie publisher making an impact. …Tell […]
Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn
Ben Granger I judge newspaper TV reviewers by a very high standard indeed. Why the hell shouldn’t I? Let’s face it, this is the dream job any human being can have. Sitting, scratching your mardy arse whilst staring out the flickers that would bombard your face anyway and getting paid for it. Jesus! They have […]
Lawrence Thornton – Imagining Argentina
Peter Robertson Lawrence Thornton’s novel Imagining Argentina explores the evolution and aftermath of that country’s "Dirty War" (1976-1983) during which between 9,000 and 30,000 civilians were "disappeared" by the military regime. First published in 1987, it won both the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and the PEN American Center West Award. But the film adaptation, directed […]
Paul Auster: Oracle Night
Stephen Mitchelmore Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability to stop reading him once a book is begun. However, in the end, […]
Mil Millington – A Certain Chemistry
Ian Hocking Mil Millington first surfaced on the web as author of the cult website ThingsMyGirlfriendAndIHaveArguedAbout.com, which comprised several thousand words of cringe-making – not to say hilarious – observations on the relationship between Mil and his German girlfriend, Margret. As Mil writes, ‘anything good you put on the web will get stolen’, and it […]
Jason Burke – Al Qaeda
Ben Granger The most striking fact Jason Burke hammers through time and again in this meticulous and comprehensive study is that “Al Qaeda” does not exist. Or at least, “Al Qaeda” the organised terrorist group, cohesive and complete we hear of in the media doesn’t. I like Spooks as much as anyone, but I fear […]
Colm Tóibín – The Story Of The Night
Peter Robertson Short-listed once again for the Booker Prize, this year for The Master, about the life of closet-gay novelist Henry James, Tóibín has become even more of a name in Britain. But his hopes were dashed a second time- in October that country’s most coveted literary prize was awarded to rival gay writer, Alan […]
Julie Burchill – Sugar Rush
Ben Granger Julie Burchill: donchajusluver??!! Well, yes, actually. There once was a time when I agreed with all my Graun reading friends “that bigoted bitch” should be humanely shot, but it seems a very long while ago now. My obsession with her venomous vitriol went from fascinated horror to perverse admiration in the time it […]
Emma Larkin: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop
Chris Mitchell This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories is actually a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in the fate of pre and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been published in the USA under the less lyrical […]
Gustave Flaubert: Bouvard and Pécuchet
Ismo Santala Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert See all books by Gustave Flaubert at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet starts with a chance meeting that has the air of serene machination about it. The encounter between two Parisian copy clerks leads to a remarkable friendship. The first meeting […]
Robert Carver – The Accursed Mountains: Journeys In Albania
Chris Mitchell This is truly an armchair traveller’s book: Robert Carver delivers a fascinating account of his time in a country that you’d never want to visit. Managing to make several journeys through Albania in the early 1990s directly after the collapse of communism and shortly before the onset of all-out anarchy, Carver reveals a […]
Anthony Swofford – Jarhead
Chris Mitchell Jarhead documents Swofford’s time in the US Marine Corps in the run up to Gulf War One – as a personal insight into the American war machine and the daily life of a scout/sniper both in preparation for and within the actual theatre of war, Jarhead is a compelling ground level description. Far […]
John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy Of Dunces
Ben Granger As the ghosts of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain will attest, nothing sells like the untimely suicide of a young talent. Dunces was written in 1967. Its failure to be published contributed to Toole’s suicide in 1969 at the age of 32. It lay lost until his mother forced it on publisher Walker […]
Colin Feltham – Problems Are Us…Or Is It Just Me?
Chris Mitchell Colin Feltham’s book is a concerted attack on the self-help industry and an uncompromising questioning of the effectiveness of counselling and therapy as a whole. Feltham’s conclusions do not provide a cheerful prognosis – in essence, he maintains that professionals and clients alike muddle through with a mish mash of different methods and […]
Rem Koolhaas – Content
Edmund Hardy Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother and has come up with a new concept: Big Vermeer. I imagined contestants marooned in very detailed interiors. Actually, the connection is more an art-historical musing: we want to see people doing things indoors, and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas […]
Ben Myers – The Book Of Fuck
Chris Mitchell With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your name forever after. Just to make things more difficult, the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about your criteria for […]
Tununa Mercado – In A State Of Memory
Peter Robertson Tununa Mercado’s memoir, In a State of Memory, recounts the pain of exile and the even greater pain of return. Mercado, an Argentine writer, experienced two periods of exile: the first, in the wake of the 1966 coup, was spent in France and lasted for three years; during the second period, spanning 1974 […]
Tom Saunders – Brother, What Strange Place is This?
Dr Ian Hocking British author Tom Saunders was once an engineer, a school caretaker, a musician, a seller of guitars and records, and, not insignificantly, a graduate of the UEA’s Creative Writing programme under Sir Malcolm Bradbury. From these experiences and with this pedigree comes the eclectic Brother, What Strange Place is This?, his debut […]
Clive Cussler – Raise The Titanic!
Chris Mitchell You can’t argue with that exclamation mark. Another milestone on my quest to rediscover classic thrillers, Raise The Titanic! is so full of plot twists the cover might as well be made up of multi coloured dots and put out at parties. It is a breath-taking, preposterous plot in which the raising of […]
Anna Funder – Stasiland
Chris Mitchell Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, fifteen years after first reading it. Orwell’s future vision is an inherent part of our culture now, commoditised and trivialised, denied shock value or reconsideration due to its very familiarity. Re-reading the book and returning to Winston Smith’s world, however, is to feel a distinct […]
Amin Maalouf – Balthasar’s Odyssey
Katrina Gulliver In the 17th century Mediterranean, there was big money to be made in smuggling mastic, a gum from a tree related to the pistachio. In use since classical times, high-class ladies and courtesans chewed it to whiten their teeth and freshen their breath. This book is full of such insights to various elements […]
Mark Andresen – Field Of Vision: The Broadcast Life Of Kenneth Allsop
Chris Mitchell Biography is often the most satisfying of all literary genres; other people’s lives frequently prove more fascinating than most fiction and the palpable, if inevitable, sense of beginning, middle and end provides a natural plotline and structure. Where most fiction is reality badly rendered, biography has the opposite problem of having to deal […]
Mike Duff – Low Life
Ben Granger Low Life looks at one low down and sleazy day in the life of Ronald “Rooftop” Rafferty, North Mancunian. Rafferty got his nickname not for his contributions to architecture but for one example of his many, constant and varied forays into the world of two-bit desperate criminality. Rooftop is a 100% proof scally, […]
Nicholson Baker – Double Fold
Chris Mitchell For bibliophiles, this is something of a horror story. Double Fold is a journalistic tour de force of the wholesale destruction wreaked upon countless unique books and periodicals within American libraries during the 1980s and early 1990s. This wasn’t the work of some crypto-fascist bookburning organisation, but the work of the libraries themselves. […]
Stewart Lee Allan – The Devil’s Cup
Katrina Gulliver From this book I learnt that my method of consuming a Vienna coffee – drinking the coffee through the cream – is apparently a terrible faux pas. The correct method involves piling the cream on the coffee (it should be served on a separate dish – attention Starbucks!) sprinkling chocolate shavings on top, […]
