Chris Hall talks to JG Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes and mail order Kalashnikovs It’s been 70 years since HG Wells published The Shape of Things to Come but there has been a far more astute chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us in the suburbs for more than half a century. […]
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 […]
Anthony Bourdain: A Cook’s Tour: Eat The World
Jayne Margetts on Anthony Bourdain’s quest to eat the most gastronomically dangerous dishes on the planet I love my authors a tad on the fresh, petulant and carnal side. A splatter of blood-and-guts-style reportage only heightens the pleasure, as do tales of human squalor and degradation. I can hack romance, but only in staccato style, […]
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 […]
Swans : Swans Are Dead : Swans’ Song
Chris Mitchell on the end of Michael Gira’s intense, undefinable and deafeningly loud musical outfit SWANS The history of music is littered with the debris of those who paid dearly for being different. From the Stooges through to Suicide and the Birthday Party, there are countless individuals and outfits who have, in retrospect, redefined the […]
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 […]
Patricia Duncker : Seven Tales Of Sex And Death : Dark Star
Chris Hall talks to Patricia Duncker about sex, death and sending porn through the German postal system Speaking from her home in Aberystwyth on the day of the Stop the War rally, Patricia Duncker is excitedly bellowing down the phone. “My niece called and asked if I was going on the march and I said […]
Peter Saville : Designed By Peter Saville : Graphic Sex
Chris Hall meets legendary designer Peter Saville “Peter Saville drives a skoda”. The appalling idea scared him off of renting one when it was offered in place of the VW Polo that he’d ordered. “I know everyone says they’re really good cars now, but I’m not gonna be in a test group for them. It’s […]
Patricia Duncker : Hallucinating Foucault : Insanity Clause
Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her novel Hallucinating Foucault “Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects that attract most of my attention.” So said the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the century’s most audacious intellectuals, who died of AIDS in 1984. Only Foucault’s books remain as a reminder of […]
Martin Millar : Love And Peace With Melody Paradise : Do It Yourself
Chris Mitchell talks to Martin Millar about his pro-traveller novel Love And Peace With Melody Paradise and how setting up his own website has brought him new readers What do you do if you’re an author who’s published several novels to widespread critical acclaim and then get unceremoniously dumped by your publisher? You’ve guessed it […]
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 […]
Tony Wheeler – Lonely Planet Unpacked
Chris Mitchell Lonely Planet: the world famous travel guidebook company which has scores of writers in the field at any one time and scores more desperately trying to get a job with this coveted organisation. So the logic behind Lonely Planet Unpacked is sound – given that LP has a veritable travel anecdote treasure trove […]
Bill Bryson – Mother Tongue
Chris Mitchell Mother Tongue is one of Bill Bryson’s earlier books and a superbly manageable and amusing treatise on the English language – where it came from, what it’s doing and where it’s going. It’s the sort of complex subject that needs the lightness of Bryson’s touch to give an obviously affectionate and enthusiastic overview […]
Alan Gurney – The Race To The White Continent
Chris Mitchell This is one book not to be judged by its cover. It features a photo of Shackleton’s ship Endurance, even though the venerable explorer barely gets a mention in Gurney’s book, and even then only at the end. As the title suggests, The Race To The White Continent is more concerned with the […]
Andrey Kurkov – Death And The Penguin
Stephen Mitchelmore This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality of the foreground subject matter to make one carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared, that is, to the foreground. Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives […]
Alan Moore – The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Chris Mitchell Take several classic 19th century literary characters – Allen Quatermain from "King Solomon’s Mines", Captain Nemo from "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea", The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, among others – bring them together as an ego-ridden but intriguing outfit under the auspices of the British Secret Service, set them within […]
Doris Lessing – The Sweetest Dream
Edmund Hardy Our sweetest dreams are, apparently, ideological. Those seductive systems of thought which attract people who want to save the world on their own terms, but who end up mired in disillusion or pedantry. There’s prime potential for grim humour when people play at being revolutionaries, and Lessing is well-placed to crack the jokes: […]
Chuck Palahniuk : I Want To Have Your Abortion
Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk When Bret Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid, Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. Ellis’ literary missile was unlike anything written before. Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking attention to detail as a Guide Book […]
El-P : Fantastic Damage
Edmund Hardy There’s something bleak and claustrophobic brewing in the beats and rhymes of New York City, and here it boils over into a seventy-minute scream of anger, apocalypse and funkiness, shot through with a menacing surrealism. The music is manic, pushed into extremity because that’s how El-P can express himself in a perceived world […]
Lou Reed – Pass Thru Fire: Collected Lyrics
Edmund Hardy Lou Reed is the craggy man in black leather, a permanent member of rock’s avant-garde without trying. Popular in all his guises, as Velvet Underground punk progenitor, as Seventies glam decadent, or as Nineties eagle-eyed chronicler. Or maybe just as the guy who wrote the original ‘Perfect Day’. But a book of song […]
