Stephen Mitchelmore "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there." Maurice Blanchot How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, asks it too. He thinks […]
Dante Alighieri: Inferno – translated by Michael Palma: The Poets’ Dante – edited by Peter S Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff
Stephen Mitchelmore “Translating is only a more intense and more demanding form of what we do whenever we read” – JM Coetzee Coetzee might also have added “whenever we live”. Unless, like the dead, one is perfectly at home in the world, a close reading of one’s environment is required to navigate and negotiate oneself […]
Charlotte Carter : Rhode Island Red, Coq Au Vin, Drumsticks : Red Hot And Blue
Chris Wiegand It’s hard not to fall in love with Nanette Hayes, the self-effacing heroine of Rhode Island Red, Coq Au Vin and Drumsticks – a trio of musical mysteries from African-American author Charlotte Carter. A sassy, streetwise, sax-playing busker, Nanette is funky, jazzy and soulful. She’s also no stranger to the Blues. Carter’s novels […]
Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation : The Absent Voice
Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that is similar […]
Timothy Clark – Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger
Stephen Mitchelmore The Routledge Critical Thinkers series is turning into something special. Maurice Blanchot by Ulrich Haase and William Large, published last year, is a profound and miraculously lucid guide to the French writer’s work. This year we have Timothy Clark’s introduction to the work of a major influence on Blanchot: the German philosopher Martin […]
Kenji Jasper – Dark
Chris Wiegand There is a fantastic scene in Martin Scorsese’s 1973 masterpiece Mean Streets. In a film packed with memorable moments, one sums up the dilemma faced by the central character perfectly. The scene is brief: Charlie and his girlfriend Teresa ‘escape’ the city (at her request) to take time out and spend the afternoon […]
Thomas Bernhard: The Making Of An Austrian and The Novels of Thomas Bernhard
Stephen Mitchelmore finds Thomas Bernhard to be elusive within two studies of the Austrian writer What if everything we can be depends on playing a role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it would mean that the public self, the one presented to the world, is not “a mask” but the original; […]
Will Self : Feeding Frenzy : Biting The Hand That Feeds
Chris Hall serves up a slice of Will Self with the publication of his second collection of journalism, Feeding Frenzy Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of your new son, Luther. Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now. CH: So […]
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
Stephen Mitchelmore (Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car crash on 14th December 2001). In its official press release, the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature praised VS Naipaul, the 2001 recipient, for "works that compel us to see the presence of […]
Neighbourhood Threat: On Tour With Iggy Pop – Alvin Gibbs: The Song Of Leonard Cohen – Harry Rasky
Chris Mitchell Tour diaries have a particular squalid glamour all of their own. First person accounts of frequently excessive life on the road have become a mini-genre within the slew of books about pop music, Hammer Of The Gods and Pamela Des Barres’ I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie being two of its […]
David Markson: This Is Not A Novel
Stephen Mitchelmore There’s always someone telling us that the novel is dead. And that is how it should be. As well as offering us the chance to laugh at the fools who parrot this announcement, it makes us ask, for the umpteenth time: what is the novel for, exactly? The question should not be answered […]
Bill Hicks : Bad Moon Rising – a tribute of sorts
Even though he’s been dead for seven years, the savage political satire of Bill Hicks makes more sense than ever. Chris Hall spreads the word. If you mention to any intelligent individual under the age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky […]
Gilles Deleuze: Proust And Signs
Stephen Mitchelmore This isn’t a new book. The French original was published in 1964 and in English eight years later. But don’t dismiss it as out-of-date. Like the book it analyses, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it pitches the reader into the future with a rare vigour. Buy this re-issue and give your […]
Peter Ackroyd – London: The Biography
Chris Hall Those who have read Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem will recall that the word golem comes from the medieval Jewish for an artificial human being brought to life by supernatural means, a “thing without form”. Ackroyd’s latest book, London: The Biography, has itself managed to breathe life into a seemingly […]
George Pelecanos: Washington DC Crime Quartet
Chris Wiegand on George Pelecanos’ contemporary hardboiled Washington DC novels With his critically acclaimed Washington DC Quartet, comprising The Big Blowdown, King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever and Shame the Devil, George P. Pelecanos has done for the mean streets of the Chocolate City what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles and Chester Himes did for […]
Hunter S. Thompson : Fear and Loathing In America and Screwjack : Postcards From The Edge
Nathan Cain reflects on the journalistic legacy of elderly dope fiend Hunter S. Thompson I found Hunter S. Thompson by accident. I was looking through the stacks at my local public library, searching for something, I don’t remember what, when I read the title Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on the spine of an […]
Ernesto Quinonez : Bodega Dreams : Spanglish Stories
Chris Wiegand meets Ernesto Quiñonez and dives into Spanish Harlem with Bodega Dreams With the short story collection Drown, Junot Diaz proved that modern literary representations of the Latin American experience could be both critically and commercially successful and Ernesto Quiñonez’s assured debut novel Bodega Dreams follows suite. Published in the U.K. by Serpent’s Tail, […]
Jean-Yves Tadie: Marcel Proust
Stephen Mitchelmore For a short time, I used to stay up most of the night. In the long summer months between school years there was no all-night radio let alone all-night television. To pass time, I would listen to the BBC World Service on poor Medium Wave reception. One night around two in the morning, […]
J.G. Ballard : Super Cannes : Flight And Imagination
Chris Hall talks about the dark side of capitalism and the deceptions of reality with J.G. Ballard Walking along Oxford Street the day after I finished reading JG Ballard’s new novel, Super-Cannes, it struck me, literally, the total acceptance of the substrate of violence in consumer societies when it manifests itself. A silent, monolithic crowd […]
Gabriel Josipovici – On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion
Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian, was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!” He didn’t elaborate. You wouldn’t expect him to. Actually, he repeated the phrase, perhaps impressed by the sudden acquisition of […]
Irvine Welsh and the UK Drug Debate
Chris Mitchell ponders the impact of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting on the UK drug debate [Spike note – this article was written in December 1997 for the now defunct Canadian online magazine Can Say. With the recent furore in the UK after seven Conservative Shadow Cabinet ministers admitted smoking pot, it seemed worth republishing. Despite there […]
Lawrence O’Toole : Pornocopia : Talking Dirty
Chris Mitchell meets Lawrence O’Toole, author of Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire It’s a well-worn joke that any dinner-party discussion of the Internet will inevitably include a mention of finding pornography while on- line. As Lawrence O’Toole points out in his book, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology And Desire, the Internet has been the biggest […]
Will Self : How The Dead Live : Dead Man Talking
Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction” ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will become flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his […]
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 […]
