Ben Granger Lunar Park – Bret Easton Ellis See all books by Bret Easton Ellis at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Lunar Park presents itself as the straightforward first-person narrative of “Bret Easton Ellis”, spoiled, self-obsessed, solipsistic rich boy etc. etc. etc. author in a state of debauched twilight. We join up with Bret as he half-heartedly […]
Suhayl Saadi : Psychoraag: The Gods Of The Door
Suhayl Saadi on why his writing remains ignored by the British literary establishment Suhayl Saadi Psychoraag – Suhayl Saadi See all books by Suhayl Saadi at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com In the context of the publicity surrounding the forthcoming novel, Londonstani, which like my recent novel, Psychoraag (Black and White Publishing, 2004), appears to play with […]
Trainspotting The Play: Harry Gibson: 10 Years On
Marina Lewycka: A Short History Of Tractors in Ukrainian
Ian Hocking The marketing executives at Viking must have tapped pens thoughtfully against teeth before agreeing to the title, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Helpfully, the book is subtitled “a novel”. The cover is nicely east European: duotone block print. Its author is Marina Lewycka, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. Her own […]
Gert Hofmann: Parable Of The Blind
Edmund Hardy The Knocker knocks on the barn door and six men stumble around, trying to get up. The novel opens: “On the day when we’re to be painted – yet another new day! – a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our sleep. No, the knocking isn’t inside us, it’s outside, […]
Raj Kamal Jha – If You Are Afraid Of Heights
Harpreet Singh Soorae Give yourself some time, he says, I will leave the pictures and the pieces of paper with you. Keep them carefully, whenever you are afraid, take them out, arrange them in whatever order you want and you will understand your parent’s stories. What stories? I ask. Of the dreams your father and […]
Christopher G. Moore: Gambling On Magic
Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush: Hurricane Julie
Ben Granger collides with Julie Burchill over several bottles of wine to seek out the dreadful truth on chavs, Stalin, Ariel Sharon and Morrissey “Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint” runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancastrian abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest shit-stirring iconic hack of our […]
Lawrence Thornton – Imagining Argentina
Peter Robertson Lawrence Thornton’s novel Imagining Argentina explores the evolution and aftermath of that country’s "Dirty War" (1976-1983) during which between 9,000 and 30,000 civilians were "disappeared" by the military regime. First published in 1987, it won both the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and the PEN American Center West Award. But the film adaptation, directed […]
Paul Auster: Oracle Night
Stephen Mitchelmore Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability to stop reading him once a book is begun. However, in the end, […]
Mil Millington – A Certain Chemistry
Ian Hocking Mil Millington first surfaced on the web as author of the cult website ThingsMyGirlfriendAndIHaveArguedAbout.com, which comprised several thousand words of cringe-making – not to say hilarious – observations on the relationship between Mil and his German girlfriend, Margret. As Mil writes, ‘anything good you put on the web will get stolen’, and it […]
Colm Tóibín – The Story Of The Night
Peter Robertson Short-listed once again for the Booker Prize, this year for The Master, about the life of closet-gay novelist Henry James, Tóibín has become even more of a name in Britain. But his hopes were dashed a second time- in October that country’s most coveted literary prize was awarded to rival gay writer, Alan […]
Julie Burchill – Sugar Rush
Ben Granger Julie Burchill: donchajusluver??!! Well, yes, actually. There once was a time when I agreed with all my Graun reading friends “that bigoted bitch” should be humanely shot, but it seems a very long while ago now. My obsession with her venomous vitriol went from fascinated horror to perverse admiration in the time it […]
Emma Larkin: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop
Chris Mitchell This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories is actually a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in the fate of pre and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been published in the USA under the less lyrical […]
Gustave Flaubert: Bouvard and Pécuchet
Ismo Santala Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert See all books by Gustave Flaubert at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet starts with a chance meeting that has the air of serene machination about it. The encounter between two Parisian copy clerks leads to a remarkable friendship. The first meeting […]
W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away
Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster, sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascination and regularity verging on schadenfreude – are the events themselves always placed at a distance, always prior to […]
John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy Of Dunces
Ben Granger As the ghosts of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain will attest, nothing sells like the untimely suicide of a young talent. Dunces was written in 1967. Its failure to be published contributed to Toole’s suicide in 1969 at the age of 32. It lay lost until his mother forced it on publisher Walker […]
Poppy Z. Brite : Will Self : Exquisite Corpse : Dorian : Bloodsuckers
Mark Richardson on the gender wars in modern Gothic fiction In recent times it has become commonplace for writers and critics alike to link contemporary gothic narratives with modern day anxieties. Two recent Gothic novels have successfully exposed our cynical attitude towards love relations and our fear of getting too close to the Other: Dorian […]
Mike Duff – Low Life
Ben Granger Low Life looks at one low down and sleazy day in the life of Ronald “Rooftop” Rafferty, North Mancunian. Rafferty got his nickname not for his contributions to architecture but for one example of his many, constant and varied forays into the world of two-bit desperate criminality. Rooftop is a 100% proof scally, […]
Louise Schaffer – The Three Miss Margarets
Katrina Gulliver The Three Miss Margarets is a tale of Southern sisterhood, tracing the lives of three women in the small town of Charles Valley. The three Miss Margarets of the title are known individually as Maggie, Li’l Bit, and Peggy. Maggie is a retired doctor in her eighties, Li’l Bit is a spinster in […]
Daniel Mason – The Piano Tuner
Katrina Gulliver The Piano Tuner is an enticing book, telling the story of Edgar Drake, the piano tuner of the title, who travels from London to Burma in 1886 to tune the grand piano of a British Surgeon Major stationed in the Shan states. This original premise helps to create the feeling of a fable, […]
Andrew Osmond – Big Fish
Alice Duberry Big Fish fits neatly into the expanding genre of ‘backpacker in peril’ novels, which perhaps began with Alex Garland’s The Beach and which found further commercial success with Emily Barr’s Backpack. Stuart Ward – the innocent abroad protagonist of Osmond’s novel – is far less cocksure than Garland’s traveller, though, and the book […]
J G Ballard : Millennium People : Entertaining Violence
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. […]
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 […]