Bunhill Fields Burial Ground near Old Street in the City of London has been given Grade I protected status. Originally the Dissenters’ burial ground, one great names of English literature have tombs here, including William Blake, Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has also listed 75 of its tombs. […]
Paul Neilan: Apathy and Other Small Victories
Jayne Margetts Okay, so I listen to Thom Yorke, and enjoy reading books about people living with a gun pointed to their head. Call it entertainment, or living vicariously through others; apathy, black humour, a touch of the politically incorrect and make me laugh out loud, in these dark and here troubled times. I remember […]
Elementarteilchen – the film of Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised :
James McConalogue Atomised – Michel Houellebecq See all books by Michel Houellebecq at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Elementarteilchen DVD This film is terrifyingly humbling, sexually polite and bravely mundane in its philosophical exploration of the fragility pervading human love. It is packed with the warmth of the everyday trials of love and passion. This film, directed […]
Michel Houellebecq: The Possibility Of An Island
James McConalogue The Possibility Of An Island – Michel Houellebecq See all books by Michel Houellebecq at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com “The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear.” – M. Houellebecq, The Guardian, 2005. As […]
John Peel : An obituary of sorts : Transmission Ends
What the death of John Peel means for music Mark Richardson Margrave Of The Marshes – John Peel See all books by John Peel at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com A week before the death of the Radio One disc jockey John Peel, an interesting exercise in semiotics was broadcast on the news. Fidel Castro, having delivered […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Paul Auster : Cruel Universe
Adrian Gargett on the writing of Paul Auster Paul Auster is not a realist. As the title of his latest book The Book of Illusions suggests, he inhabits a world of illusion. His novels are worldly, finely tuned, elegant and knowingly self-referential. An academic whose wife and two sons die in a plane crash, leaving […]
Rachel Seiffert – The Dark Room
Sally-Ann Spencer We have all seen the photos – the terrible photos of skeletal corpses, the frightening pictures of uniformed killers. In The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert returns to the horror of the Third Reich to reveal these and other, less familiar images. Alongside photos of concentration camps, we see pictures of a kindly mother […]
Bruce Wagner : I’ll Let You Go : Loss And Reconciliation
Dan Epstein talks to Wild Palms creator Bruce Wagner about his new novel I’ll Let You Go I first met Bruce Wagner in Los Angeles around the middle of 1997. I was and still am a rabid David Cronenberg afficionado. I was walking along the Venice Beach walk when I passed two gentlemen wearing suits. […]
Gitta Sereny : The German Trauma
With the publication of her new 75 year study The German Trauma, Eugene Byrne talks to Gitta Sereny Eugene Byrne For someone who’s spent most of her adult life staring into the abyss, Gitta Sereny laughs a heck of a lot. “I love to laugh. I laugh a great deal. I think because of my […]
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 […]
Cedric Mims: When We Die
Robin Askew The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets purple on the underside of the body where the blood accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal microbes gobble up the gut […]
Paul Celan : After The Disaster
Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan “With a variable key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that spurts from your eye or your mouth or your ear. You vary the key, you vary the word that […]
William S. Burroughs: Last Words
Nathan Cain The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered a bit much. Without a doubt, Ginsberg and Kerouac have been the most popular authors of the Beat movement, but the fact remains that Kerouac’s reputation is based on one work of […]
Chester Himes : Lesley Himes: A Life Of Absurdity : Life After Chester
Mark Ostrowski meets Lesley Himes, widow of the late, great Chester Himes Women without men: María survived Borges; Linda Lee, Bukowski; Mary, Hemingway; and Lesley, Himes. Women who dealt with their husbands’ blindness, alcoholism, mental disorders, strokes. Women who now control the reproduction of their late husbands’ work, their copyright. I was ruminating on the […]
Timothy Leary: Design For Dying
Chris Mitchell Even in death, Timothy Leary is still trying to shatter society’s taboos. Design For Dying appears eighteen months after the former Harvard psychologist turned LSD guru passed away from prostate cancer. Written during his last months, Leary’s book attempts to dispel our fear of death by suggesting that technology increasingly lets us orchestrate […]
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 […]
