Chris Hall gives a crash course in the fiction of JG Ballard Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of JG Ballard’s fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the […]
Will Self : Great Apes : Self Destruction
Chris Mitchell finds out why Will Self doesn’t give a monkeys Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “mile high club”. Unless you were in a apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general election, (or living in another country), you can’t have failed to have seen […]
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 […]
A.L. Kennedy : Original Bliss : Blissed Out
Bethan Roberts talks to A.L. Kennedy about weird sex and the problem with women’s writing I recently went to see AL Kennedy give a reading at the Sussex Arts Club. While the atrocious lighting made her look as if she were about to burst into a rock anthem or become involved in some sci-fi nonsense, […]
P.J. O’Rourke : Age And Guile : Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll
Chris Mitchell encounters the age and guile of political satirist P.J. O’Rourke the American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke recently published Age And Guile, which gathers together previously uncollected material spanning his 25 years of journalism. PJ has built his merciless literary reputation on three things: irritating American liberals, abusing chemicals and visiting every warzone […]
Douglas Rushkoff : Children Of Chaos (Playing The Future) : Lost In Translation
Chris Mitchell speaks to Douglas Rushkoff about making sense of the future “My career is based on the fact that I’m close enough to the boomers to be able to speak their language, but close enough to the busters to understand what the hell it is that they’re doing. I’m one of the hinge […]
Gwyneth Jones : Phoenix Cafe : Phoenix Rising
Chris Mitchell hears about the strange truth of science fiction from Gwyneth Jones “I’m in a fairly lonely position as a British woman writing science fiction,” says Brighton-based novelist Gwyneth Jones, but then, it’s always lonely at the top. Her new novel Phoenix Café has recently received widespread acclaim from the national press, which […]
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography: The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin and Damned To Fame by James Knowlson :
Despite two recent authorative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore argues that Beckett remains an enigma It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven years after his death, remains as distant as ever. […]
Douglas Coupland : Polaroids From The Dead : From Fear To Eternity
Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the problem with American chocolate Douglas Coupland is not your average novelist. Since the publication of Generation X in 1991, he has become one of this decade’s most important writers, thanks to his unerring ability to capture the zeitgeist of young middle class America in […]
Jeff Noon : Automated Alice : Fairytales From The Future
Bethan Roberts talks to Jeff Noon about his new novel Automated Alice What’s really nice about Jeff Noon is that, firstly, I can use a word like “nice” about him (not, I expect, a word most cyberpunks would be comfortable with), and secondly, beyond the street-level-city-techno-punkiness that precedes him in the form of his […]
Iain Banks : Whit and Excession: Getting Used To Being God
Chris Mitchell meets the relentlessly imaginative Iain.M Banks Twelve years and fourteen books since the publication of his debut novel The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks has become one of Britain’s most prominent and prolific writers. Whether writing mainstream novels as plain “Iain Banks” or science fiction under his ubiquitous “Iain M. Banks” nom-de-plume, Banks […]
Francis Ford Coppola : The Godfather : Saturday Night Fever: John Badham: Sex And Spaghetti
Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man, from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever With The Godfather recently re-released in a new print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths, screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia families – all with excessive amounts of […]
The Significance Of Names In The Fiction Of Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Will Self, Umberto Eco : Waiting For Go.Dot
Chris Hall on the significance of names in fiction and film The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name ‘Godot’ is missing from any parental ‘Book Of Names’ (although […]
Andy Warhol: SPIKE looks at I Shot Andy Warhol: There She Goes Again
Chris Mitchell sees the American premiere of I Shot Andy Warhol The debut feature from writer-director Mary Harron, which opened in New York last month, takes a hitherto unexamined angle on the Warhol myth. I Shot Andy Warhol tells the story of Valerie Solanis, Warhol’s would-be assassin and author of the S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting […]
Alberto Sciamma : The Killer Tongue : Suck It And See
Chris Mitchell gets a sneak preview of the outrageous new film, The Killer Tongue This year’s Cannes Festival witnessed an explosion of tongues, transvestites and the tightest costumes ever devised with the premier screening of The Killer Tongue, the debut film from the Brighton-based production company Spice Factory. Starring Robert (‘Freddie Krueger’) Englund and Doug […]
Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2
Adam Baron Richard Powers’ fictional hero (also titled Richard Powers) returns from years in the Netherlands to the University that gave him his love of Literature. The author of four novels, Powers is to be the Humanist in residence in the newly built cognitive science centre, a labyrinth of laboratories and computer networks. Powers does […]
Quentin Crisp: Resident Alien: The New York Diaries
Chris Mitchell As camp as Christmas and twice as sparkly, Mr. Quentin Crisp makes his literary return with Resident Alien. Featuring selections from his diaries between 1990 to 1994, Resident Alien describes the hectic social whirl of one “who is in the profession of being.” Never refusing an invitation, Quentin lives a life in which […]
Andrei Codrescu: The Blood Countess
Adam Baron When I was teaching English in the Slovak Republic a few years ago, I was told the story of Elizabeth Bathory, “the blood sucking Countess of Cahtice,” a town in Slovakia which used to be part of Hungary. Countess Elizabeth, in a bizarre twist to the droit de seigneur, was alleged to have […]
Iain Sinclair: Conductors Of Chaos
Chris Mitchell Poetry, far more than fiction, is a difficult one to discuss. One reader’s revulsion is another’s revelation. So at first sight I thought Conductors of Chaos would be right up SPIKE’s alley (as it were) due to Picador billing it as the collection which Faber & Faber dare not publish. Cool! I thought. […]
Marcus Gray: It Crawled From The South: An R.E.M. Companion
Chris Mitchell This is the second edition of Marcus Gray’s definitive encyclopaedic guide to R.E.M., one of the few intelligent bands capable of regularly packing stadiums. Conceived as a comprehensive reference source for the diehard R.E.M. fan rather than the usual sycophantic rawk biography, It Crawled from The South features self- contained and cross-referenced chapters […]
Irvine Welsh: Ecstasy: Three Chemical Romances
Chris Mitchell With the phenomenal success of Trainspotting (in all its various literary, filmic and dramatic guises), Irvine Welsh has moved from semi-literary obscurity to the centre of contemporary English writing. Trainspotting was one of those books that provoked people who hated reading to devour its three-hundred plus pages. This never happened with Martin Amis. […]
Joel And Ethan Coen : Fargo : Love Minus Zero
Fargo Joel And Ethan Coen Chris Mitchell Snow most often appears in the movies as the signifier of Christmas cheer. It may be cold outside, but it looks beautiful and everyone has a rosy glow on their faces and in their hearts. Fargo is different. From the blizzard which rages in the opening scenes through […]
Quentin Crisp : Resident Alien : An Englishman In New York
Chris Mitchell goes for lunch with Quentin Crisp This month sees the publication of Resident Alien, the selected diaries of Quentin Crisp. It is difficult to surmise whether this man needs an introduction or not, such is his longevity as a cult figure of quintessential Englishness, “a stately old homo of England”, to quote […]
