An interview with Prague’s publisher of essential Eastern and Central European writing Prague’s Twisted Spoon Press produce some of the most beautiful books currently in print. Founded in 1992, by Howard Sidenberg, Kevin Blahut and Lukas Tomin, the publishing house has translated a string of classic and contemporary Central and Eastern European titles. Beginning with […]
Vija Celmins: Desert, Sea, and Stars
Museum Ludwig in Cologne presents a retrospective of the artist’s remarkable work Vija Celmins, Untitled (Web 4), 2002 Drypoint and photogravure on paper, 51.1x61cm © 2002 Vija Celmins and Gemini G.E.L. LLC Courtesy McKee Gallery Webs are an appropriate subject for Vija Celmins’ images. Reworked from photographs and built with painstaking precision, sometimes over years, […]
Leader: The Group Mind and Collaborative Communities
Jason Weaver goes in search of the creative city and loses himself in the collective mind Where does creative work originate? Anybody who has worked collaboratively can tell you about the mysterious processes at play. The excitement and flow of a creative project appears psychic at times. When things are going well, serendipity seems predestined. […]
Structure and subatomics: Don DeLillo, Underworld and the new historical novel
Jason Weaver revisits Don DeLillo’s premillennial opus of paranoia and baseball. The title of Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld alludes both to living under the canopy of the bomb and to a world beneath us, more specifically a hell. DeLillo has publicly stated that he wanted to write about the ‘secret’ history of the Cold […]
Brian Eno: Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Warp)
Reviewed by Jason Weaver Brian Eno has nothing to prove. For all the complaints against his work with Coldplay, it’s likely that he sees it as viable territory for connecting disparate points on the cultural grid. Much of his work has been about inhabiting different environments and exploring the conditions of what might seem like […]
Andrzej Stasiuk – Tales of Galicia
Jason Weaver Tales of Galicia is set in the south-east corner of Poland a few years after the fall of Communism. A time of upheaval certainly but, as the name of the volume implies, this part of the world is no stranger to social change. A mountainous region, once called Galicia, it rolled down into […]
Alain Mabanckou – Broken Glass
Jason Weaver Broken Glass is a derelict who drinks at a bar called Credit Gone West in the Trois-Cents district of the DR Congo. As a disgraced school teacher and unrepentant drunk, he is an unconventional narrator, the kind we might find in Camus novels. The words you are reading, he explains, are jottings made […]
Amos Tutuola – The Palm-Wine Drinkard
“…The Palm-Wine Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebulous comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice in Wonderland, but things behave very differently from even these european gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight world….”
Chris Abani – Becoming Abigail
“…In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like “Please Daddy No”and “A Child Called It”. It’s redolent of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s inhumanity to man… and then make a programme about it.” On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian girl caught up in the skin trade…”
Nicholas Blincoe: Jello Salad: John L. Williams: Faithless
Jason Weaver sees two very different sides of London in Nicholas Blincoe’s Jello Salad and John L. Williams’ Faithless What is there to say about Jello Salad by Nicholas Blincoe? Well, there’s a bit of sex, and a lot of drugs and even more violence. Blincoe’s characters do things to the body that will never […]
Liz Evans: Girls Will Be Boys: Women Report On Rock
Jason Weaver Now, here’s a conundrum. Liz Evans has edited a volume of journalism on contemporary rock music written exclusively by women and here am I, a man, sent out to review it. Ideologically thin ice. I have to confess, I’m tripping over every nuance. A wrong-footed phrase is going to sound like an alibi, […]
make up: it’s not only rock N roll but I like it
Jason Weaver on the musical impact of rock’n’roll band make up The Marxist project was about the conditions of work. Parasites grew fat on the labour of those who worked only to stay alive, an imbalance based on the arbitrary division of society. Marx phrased this situation as an equation, a mathematical formula, an argument. […]
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 […]
