Robin Askew Nature has played a cruel trick on Dr. Benedict Lambert, the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics. He’s achondroplastic, phenotypically abnormal, macrocephalic with pronounced lumbar lordosis: a dwarf. A brilliant geneticist himself, Ben has devoted his life to isolating the gene that made him the way he is. There’s not […]
Cedric Mims: When We Die
Robin Askew The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets purple on the underside of the body where the blood accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal microbes gobble up the gut […]
Amy Prior: Retro Retro
Chris Wiegand As Y2K dropped, London-based writer Amy Prior wasn’t thinking about the new millennium. Her thoughts were with passed eras populated by teddy boys, ’50s teenagers and matinee idols. When Serpent’s Tail asked her to come up with a theme for a new short story anthology, the former charity shop clothes model decided to […]
Barry Miles: The Beat Hotel
Nathan Cain 9 rue Git-le-Coeur is an address that looms large in the literary landscape of the last half of the twentieth century. It was, until 1963, the site of an anonymous, low-rent flophouse on the traditionally bohemian Left Bank. It would be a wholly unremarkable place, indistinguishable from the many other similar hotels in […]
Huston Smith: Cleansing The Doors Of Perception
Nathan Cain Popular culture is, for the first time since Aldous Huxley published his (in)famous book The Doors of Perception in 1954, without a narcomancer. With the recent passing of Terrence McKenna, a void has been left in our culture. No one dominant individual is out there positing far out theories about the purported benefits […]
David Blatner: The Joy Of Pi
Robin Askew Ever since Longitude and Fermat’s Last Theorem leapt off the shelves in quantities so-called bestselling novelists can only dream about, publishers have been falling over themselves in the scramble to find the next slim tome that humanises some arcane corner of scientific research while flattering its readership into believing that they’ve acquired a […]
Richard Witts – Artist Unknown: An Alternative History Of The Arts Council
Robin Askew "The Arts Council has piddled about in the cultural life of Great Britain for half a century." From this opening sentence, former arts administrator Richard Witts mounts a sustained attack on the cranky Council’s waste, incompetence and stupidity, gleefully exposing fiasco after fiasco until the reader begins to marvel that any art actually […]
Tim Parks: Destiny
Stephen Mitchelmore I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth, or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply […]
Joanne Harris: Chocolat
Simon Kirrane "Is this the best book ever written?” gushes one of the review quotes listed in the front of this paperback (The Literary fucking Review, who should know better). And not since The Wasp Factory have I seen a paperback’s early pages weighed down with such a mass of critical commentary. The inversion here […]
Paul Stump – Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music
Stephen Harper Yesterday, Bryan Ferry nearly killed me. Lost in the music on my car stereo, I took a sharp corner on the A7 south of Edinburgh at a foolish speed. Unable to turn quickly enough, I lost control of the car and skidded to a stop on the wrong side of a road, nanoinches […]
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein
Stephen Mitchelmore "I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face. No one else on all this earth had such features. This was the most amazing thing in the life of the world." These sentences come from the final page of Saul Bellow’s previous novel "The Actual", which, I seem to remember, he said […]
Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves
Gary Marshall House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel has been described as a "literary Blair Witch Project’ – a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with. The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a […]
William S. Burroughs: Last Words
Nathan Cain The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered a bit much. Without a doubt, Ginsberg and Kerouac have been the most popular authors of the Beat movement, but the fact remains that Kerouac’s reputation is based on one work of […]
Illiad – Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell
Gary Marshall Even by the standards of American humour, Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell is unusual; a book of cartoons that should carry a set of minimum system requirements. Where Scott Adams’ Dilbert series concentrates more on universal office themes, with a worrying tendency to fill half of the books with new age self-help nonsense, […]
John King: Headhunters
Jayne Margetts By nature, the female of the species should NOT enjoy the works of British writer, John King. Why? Because he is everything that the Loaded-generation embody. Because he is a male chauvinists’ dream. Because women are only vessels of sexual gratification for men. Because his novels are filled with the testosterone of too […]
James Gleick: Faster
Chris Mitchell Faster is a survey of the speed of modern life. Subtitled "The acceleration of just about everything", it’s a book which takes time out to stop and think about the breakneck pace at which we live our lives and the ramifications of doing so. Unsurprisingly, technology has played a big part in increasing […]
Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant Than The Sun
Chris Mitchell Technology is often seen as having a negative influence on music. Ever since the advent of sound generated by machines rather than traditional instruments, there have been dire predictions about the death of the Song. More Brilliant Than The Sun takes the opposite attitude and celebrates these strange new technologically-based forms of music, […]
Toni Davidson: Scar Culture
Jayne Margetts Canongate’s Rebel Inc imprint has become the torchbearer for the Dysfunctional Generation. If grim reality, catharsis and profane verse is your poison then chances are they can prescribe a literary hotchpotch of cutting-edge contemporary writers to suit your taste buds. Feeling pessimistic or down-right suicidal then look no further than the critically lauded […]
Laurence O’Toole: Pornocopia
Robin Askew "To write, as I have, with an enthusiasm for something so loathed in certain quarters is maybe asking for trouble," acknowledges Independent, New Statesman and Daily Telegraph contributor Laurence O’Toole in his introduction to this excellent survey of "porn, sex, technology and desire". He’s certainly seen enough of the stuff during his three […]
Jorge Luis Borges: The Total Library
Stephen Mitchelmore The last story in The Book of Sand, a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, is itself called "The Book of Sand". It is a story about the discovery and disposal of a book whose pages never remain the same from one reading to the next. The book is in effect infinite, […]
William Gibson: All Tomorrow’s Parties
Chris Mitchell William Gibson is never going to be able to live down being the sci-fi author who coined the term "cyberspace". First used in his debut novel Neuromancer which was published during the early 1980s, it was soon picked up on as an uncannily accurate description of the then-emerging Internet. His latest novel is […]
Thom Jones – Sonny Liston Was A Friend Of Mine
OJ Irish If you don’t drink or smoke, reading Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine will make you wish you did. If, like most people, you do, then you’ll feel better about it and want to switch up to Jim Beam and Lucky Strikes immediately. Jones’ writing is what you might call ‘Zippo Prose’ […]
Lionel Rolfe – Fat Man On The Left
Lewis Owens Despite the title, Lionel Rolfe is far more than simply an overweight Lefty. Journalist, author, musician, he is a self-confessed Californian bohemian. Indeed, Fat Man On The Left effectively captures the pulsating and often contradictory atmosphere of his Los Angeles hometown: chaotic, sometimes self-indulgent, but ultimately alive, exhilarating and highly attractive. As the […]
Tom Baker: Who On Earth Is Tom Baker?
Robin Askew At the risk of turning into one of those dreadful thirtysomething nostalgia bores, the Tom Baker incarnation of Dr Who has a special place in the hearts of those of my generation. Forever fixed in my mind is the time I queued for hours with hundreds of other grubby pre-teens in a smalltown […]
Douglas Coupland – Miss Wyoming
Gary Marshall With the success of Generation X, Douglas Coupland found himself in the role of spokesman for a disaffected generation, documenting the ennui of twentysomethings in a world where even the most radical youth movements are quickly co-opted and commercialised by the mainstream. Microserfs followed soon afterwards, a soap opera covering the tangled relationships […]
