Chris Mitchell LA may be the City Of Angels, but in Donald Rawley’s debut collection of short stories, it’s also a city of ghosts. Slow Dance On The Fault Line describes those lives normally lost within the noise of the night, finding the memories, dreams and moments in people’s lives which are built, like the […]
Norman Mailer – Of A Fire On The Moon
Ian Hocking Here is Norman Mailer, born eighty-one years ago, married six times, the great egotist and American literary lion. In 1968, Mailer was jailed for his part in the Washington peace rallies. Soon after, he ran against five others for the Mayor of New York. He attracted five per cent of the vote. In […]
Maurice Blanchot – Nowhere Without No
Stephen Mitchelmore Not half way through the year but already a book has come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it – the book of the year. I am aware that there is something desperate about such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty time with an evasive monument. […]
Mike Daisey – 21 Dog Years: Doing Time At Amazon.com
Chris Mitchell I hesitate to call Mike Daisey’s book profound but it’s certainly got a lot more depth than most corporate bitching books. 21 Dog Years is actually a love story of sorts – of how self-confessed slacker Daisey fell for the shiny dream of new start-up Amazon and the charisma of Jeff Bezos which […]
Al Franken – Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Ben Granger Four years back book publishers thought there was more chance of a Leo Sayer revival than a mass upsurge in popular political book sales. Then a hard-right East Coast rich kid posing as a Western cowboy steals an election and a polarizing red-raw societal nerve is struck. People who don’t like Dubya really […]
Mark Simpson – Saint Morrissey
Ben Granger This book is not for people who’ve never, even briefly, fallen under Morrissey’s spell. Don’t bother; it’ll only convince you further of the psycho-obsessive nature of Morrissey fans in general and the author in particular. Don’t bother either if you’re looking for new facts about The Smiths or Morrissey, anything to do with […]
Tim Gautreaux – The Clearing
Katrina Gulliver In 1923, Byron Aldridge is working as the constable at a mill in Louisiana. Nimbus, the mill settlement, is somewhere in the bayou – miles from the nearest town and inches from the nearest alligator. Byron, the son of a rich Pittsburgh family, is embittered by his experiences on the Western Front and […]
Louise Schaffer – The Three Miss Margarets
Katrina Gulliver The Three Miss Margarets is a tale of Southern sisterhood, tracing the lives of three women in the small town of Charles Valley. The three Miss Margarets of the title are known individually as Maggie, Li’l Bit, and Peggy. Maggie is a retired doctor in her eighties, Li’l Bit is a spinster in […]
Daniel Mason – The Piano Tuner
Katrina Gulliver The Piano Tuner is an enticing book, telling the story of Edgar Drake, the piano tuner of the title, who travels from London to Burma in 1886 to tune the grand piano of a British Surgeon Major stationed in the Shan states. This original premise helps to create the feeling of a fable, […]
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – News Of A Kidnapping
Chris Mitchell "The men opened Maruja’s door and another two opened Beatriz’s. The fifth shot the driver in the head through the glass, and the silencer made it sound no louder than a sigh. Then he opened the door, pulled him out, and shot him three more times as he lay on the ground. It […]
The Fall: Mick Middles – Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Simon Ford
Ben Granger weighs up two attempts to explain the wonderful and frightening world of The Fall These two new books are a timely reminder of a group whose shocking individuality has been obscured by virtue of their sheer longevity. A reminder this band is not that nauseatingly cosy term "an institution", but a force distending […]
Phra Peter Pannapadipo – Phra Farang: An English Monk in Thailand
Chris Mitchell What would possess a middle aged English businessman to give up his wealthy, comfortable lifestyle in London and become a Buddhist monk living in one of the poorest districts of Thailand? In Phra Farang (Thai for "Western monk"), Phra Peter Pannapadipo, formerly Mr Peter Robinson, tries to explain what led him to such […]
Andrew Osmond – Big Fish
Alice Duberry Big Fish fits neatly into the expanding genre of ‘backpacker in peril’ novels, which perhaps began with Alex Garland’s The Beach and which found further commercial success with Emily Barr’s Backpack. Stuart Ward – the innocent abroad protagonist of Osmond’s novel – is far less cocksure than Garland’s traveller, though, and the book […]
Timothy Findley – Pilgrim
Qurat ul ain Siddiqui The year is 1912 and noted psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung is faced with a grave dilemma when a new patient is brought to the Bürgholzli Clinic in Zürich where Jung resides. The patient not only reveals to the psychiatrist the claim that he has lived forever but he also has proofs […]
Zoe Trope – Please Don’t Kill The Freshman
Jayne Margetts strolls down the angry and angst-filled school corridors of Zoe Trope Post Columbine, High School is a weird kinda place; it’s not so much trapped in the aftermath of a shooting-range emporium frenzy as it is floating in the jetsam of Leftist magazines, strange poetry & Birkenstocks. Today “Lipstick lesbians, cracked-coffee-cream-lips & obnoxious […]
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
Ian Hocking In the deepest American South, Addie Bundren lies on her deathbed. She was a powerful woman. Her family have gathered to watch her die. All but one: outside, working to the last ticks of Addie’s clock, her son, Cash, renders her coffin. When at last she dies, it falls to her family to […]
Margaret Atwood – Oryx And Crake
Jayne Margetts Have you ever hit that juncture at the gritty-4am-to-sunrise shift when the TV is fuzzing in the background to the ultraviolet rhythm of the dawn? You know, when there is scant evidence of life and when pre-Cable TV left the insomniacs dribbling at B-grade movies and David Carradine eulogizing the virtues of Anthropology? […]
Richard Powers – Plowing The Dark
Chris Mitchell Plowing The Dark is nothing if not a novel of ideas. Set in the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Powers’ novel juxtaposes two parallel narratives – one concerning the rise of virtual reality, computer generated simulation that reached to become indistinguishable from reality – and the other concerning Taipur Martin, a American taken hostage […]
Douglas Adams – The Salmon Of Doubt
Ian Hocking When I was twelve, I bought a text-adventure game called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for my Amiga 500 computer. The box had ‘Don’t Panic!’ written in large, friendly letters on the front and showed a green alien sticking its tongue out. Inside was a floppy disk, planning permission for a hyperspace […]
Alan Warner – The Man Who Walks
Jerome Deg It is difficult to know where to start with a writer as good as Warner and a novel as diverse and brilliant as The Man Who Walks. The danger is that you’ll end up sounding like movie-blurb whilst bandying words like ‘genius’, ‘spiralling, rip-roaring’ and ‘provocative’. It is difficult to precisely quantify why […]
Norman Mailer – Ancient Evenings
Ian Hocking It is difficult to review Ancient Evenings, but not as difficult as reading it. It is 300, 000 words long. Its American author, Norman Mailer, is recognized as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His first book, The Naked and the Dead, was a New York Times bestseller for […]
Nicholson Baker – A Box Of Matches
Chris Hall Or, Something Funny Happened On The Way Down To Tie My Shoelaces. Yes, after a few (highly idiosyncratic) non-fiction outings we’re back in the terrifyingly detailed world of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Where there were escalators, urinals and drinking straws, there are now cafetieres, soap bars and envelopes. The novel is 33 […]
Angus Oblong – Creepy Susie: and 13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Childre
Jayne Margetts The first time I laid eyes upon the troubled cast of Royston Vasey’s The League Of Gentlemen I almost vomited. Such grotesque, pantomime-scarred characters, which could turn the stomach with a flutter of the eyelash, stirred the strings of disturbance with all and sundry. A BAFTA Award (2000 for Production) confirmed that comedy […]
Jacques Roubaud – The Great Fire Of London: a story with interpolations and bifurcations
Stephen Mitchelmore I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel The Great Fire of London many times. No, that’s not true. I have not written anything. Rather, I have felt many times the need to write about The Great Fire of London. But that’s not true either. I have felt the need to remove […]
Stuart Walton – Out Of It
Chris Mitchell Given the jacket cover emblazoned with dayglo euphemisms for getting altered and the obligatory chortling review quotes from numerous lad mags, you’d be forgiven for wondering at first glance if Stuart Walton’s book is a paragon of research sobriety. But rather than being another cheap cash-in on the still-burgeoning UK drug scene, Out […]
