Reviewed by Declan Tan Not every book looks and feels like an artefact when you pick it up. Oftentimes it is just words printed across cheap paper, the literal form of it separated from its content, cased in a merely functional cover with some gluey binding. But with Five Wounds, an “illuminated novel”, the very […]
Mapping the Wilderness: An Interview with Alexi Zentner
Set in the harsh forests of the Canadian wilderness, Alexi Zentner’s debut novel, Touch, draws upon mythology as well as literary convention. Dan Coxon finds that its author is rooted in the power of traditional storytelling. Portrait by Laurie Willick. For a debut novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch has already earned a startling number of accolades, […]
Steve Aylett: Lint The Movie
Reviewed by Declan Tan Until recently, the promise of Steve Aylett’s £750 foray into feature-length film productions had seemingly been wandering desultorily around the Internet for quite some time, indulging in some shallow vanishing since 2009, popping up here and there on blogs, before triumphantly reappearing for its premiere in Brighton earlier this year. Followed […]
Jill McGivering: Far from my Father’s House
Jill McGivering is a BBC foreign correspondent and has reported from all over the world, including some of its poorest and most conflict scarred countries. In Far from my Father’s House, her second novel, she employs her wealth of experience in the field to tell tale of Layla, a young Muslim woman, and the destruction […]
The Colour of Money: An Interview with Peter Mountford
Set against the backdrop of South America’s poorest economy, Peter Mountford’s first novel is a smart read on the human side of economic, political and ethical dramas. For the author it was also a long road to publication, as Dan Coxon learns. Portrait by Jennifer Mountford In a literary landscape dominated by celebrity memoirs and […]
The Design of Jonathan Walker’s Five Wounds
Five Wounds is something of a contemporary classic: a manuscript crossed with Kit Williams’ playful imagination, informed by the language of graphic novels. Although very much a book, in the tactile sense, it has half an eye on what a book might be in a digital era. Jonathan Walker, the author of Five Wounds shares […]
Charlie Hill: The Space Between Things
Reviewed by Declan Tan Charlie Hill’s debut novel seems already to have been pigeonholed as a love-story, a certainly tragic one, between its narrator, Arch (a character who has already made appearances on the independent literary scene) and Vee, the counterpoint to Arch’s solipsistic, inward-looking existence. Set in the early 1990s, the novel begins at […]
San Pedro on St. George’s Day: Letter From La Paz II
Declan Tan’s second ‘Letter from La Paz’ is a fictional account of a visit to Bolivia’s San Pedro prison “A pint a-Carling yeah and whatever you’re havin’,” a white-spit mouth, mine, chums out familiar to the bar girl. I’m pointing at the tap and reaching my hand out as it pours, my fingers snatching at […]
For Your Eyes Only: The Illustrated Bond
Titan books have released their second omnibus of the Daily Express comic strips based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Francis J. Okolo gives the debrief A cursory flick through the illustrations in this wonderful collection sends you hurtling back to a pre-swinging-’60’s London of oak-panelled offices, old school ties and gentlemen’s clubs. John McLusky’s drawings prove a prescient […]
Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas
Published a few years before the works that made him a posthumous literary superstar, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas is an evasive, hybrid beast. Ben Granger gets to grips with it This arcane curiosity of a book – first published in Roberto Bolaño’s native Chile a few years before more his more famous […]
Imaginary World: An Interview with Sade Adeniran
Nigerian author Sade Adeniran self-published her first novel, Imagine This, and went on to win the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel. She took time out from working on her second book to tell Mary-Claire Wilson how she did it, what inspires her and why she prefers Mills & Boon Imagine a self-published book by […]
An Interview With Jeanette Hewitt
Jeanette Hewitt Is the author of Freedom First Peace Later, a novel about life in Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, against the backdrop of Republican activity. The book was first published in December by BlueWood. and has been submitted for The Orwell Prize 2011. In 2008, Jeanette Hewitt won the silver award for the Author v Author […]
Joolz Denby and Ignite Books
From New Model Army to award-winning novels, Joolz Denby has created an impressive body of work. Now, with poet Steve Pottinger, she launches Ignite Books Poet, author, artist, vocalist, and all-round force of nature Joolz Denby recently published her latest novel The Curious Mystery of Miss Larkin and the Widow Marvell. Though more playful than […]
Hideous Kinky: An Interview with Stephen C. Bird
Dolly Delightly is granted an audience with New York performer, artist and ‘downright dirty’ author Stephen C. Bird Writer, performer and artist Stephen C. Bird was born in Ontario, Canada, but has spent most of his life in New York City. He studied theatre with the Stella Adler Conservatory in association with New York University, […]
Sweeping Narratives: Joan Didion
Kevin Fitzgerald gathers together the narrative fragments of Didion’s novels and finds that identity is a collaborative process In her essay ‘Facing Reality’, Marilynne Robinson likens our present model of the world to so much ‘floorsweep’ – the meagre skimmings from a hundred years’ worth of economics, history, technology merged into a seamless narrative. It […]
Voices of Nigeria: An Interview with E.C. Osondu
Nigerian writer E.C Osondu won the 2009 Caine Prize, otherwise known as the African Booker, for his short story Waiting. An anthology of his stories, Voice of America, has been published to widespread critical acclaim. Here, he speaks to Mary-Claire Wilson from his home in Rhode Island, where he is assistant professor of English at […]
Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s LA Bus Tour
Take a ride on the wild side with Esotouric’s tours of LA’s underbelly “We’re not your ordinary tour company,” suggests the website of Los Angeles-based Esotouric. Indeed. Rather than curb crawling around Laurel Canyon squinting at George Clooney’s house through binoculars, Richard Schave and Kim Cooper offer tours the rest of us want to see. […]
The Agony and the Sweat: A Southern Author on Southern Gothic
Stinson Carter, journalist and author of Southern Gothic novel False River, offers a personal introduction to the genre Tennessee Williams called it “Romanticized Melancholy”. William Faulkner called it “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself”. Southern Gothic Literature has as many definitions as it does voices. It is not Gothic, nor should […]
Contemporary Russian Authors
Russian fiction is on the rise. Spike profiles some of the key authors in translation At the London Book Fair 2011, the Market Focus will be on contemporary writing from Russia. Fifty writers and 60 publishers will present new books, representative of an explosion of literary activity during the past 20 years. Poets such as […]
Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings
Ben Granger Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like “Funes the Memorious”, “The Library of Babel” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Borges explores the […]
Unholy Terrors – The horror writings of Arthur Machen
John King: Headhunters
Jayne Margetts By nature, the female of the species should NOT enjoy the works of British writer, John King. Why? Because he is everything that the Loaded-generation embody. Because he is a male chauvinists’ dream. Because women are only vessels of sexual gratification for men. Because his novels are filled with the testosterone of too […]