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 […]
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 […]
Morrissey : You Are The Quarry
Ben Granger And so to the comeback of the year. Seven years without a contract, self-exiled to LA, the avatar of the awkward fled his homeland after a bitter divorce with the UK music press, a separation all the more sour because the ardour was once so strong. The eternal chronicler of the downtrodden seemed […]
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. […]
Donald Rawley – Slow Dance On The Fault Line
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 […]
Franz Ferdinand : Franz Ferdinand
Ben Granger Just because every music critic in the land suddenly simultaneously drools like a sick puppy over some hot new things, it doesn’t mean said things are actually that good. The slavish adulation these uber-foppish young Glaswegians are getting across the board is off-putting because it has so many bad precedents. Music mags, broadsheets, […]
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 […]
8mm : Opener EP
Chris Mitchell The efforts of unsigned bands are something I usually prefer to pass over in silence. There’s a simple reason why many bands remain unsigned: because they’re bloody awful. Or, perhaps more accurately, so hopelessly mediocre as to provoke nothing but indifference. I subscribe to the theory of sonic Darwinism – those who are […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
