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 […]
Simon Mawer: Mendel’s Dwarf
Robin Askew Nature has played a cruel trick on Dr. Benedict Lambert, the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics. He’s achondroplastic, phenotypically abnormal, macrocephalic with pronounced lumbar lordosis: a dwarf. A brilliant geneticist himself, Ben has devoted his life to isolating the gene that made him the way he is. There’s not […]
Jeff Noon : Pixel Juice : Dub Til It Bleeds
Polly Marshall hears why sci-fi is a four letter word for the Lee Scratch Perry of contemporary letters, Jeff Noon Jeff Noon’s gorgeous girlfriend has her hands on the wheel and a crazy glint in her big blue eyes. Jeff and Julie are my not entirely reliable guides on the Vurt tour, a late night […]
David Blatner: The Joy Of Pi
Robin Askew Ever since Longitude and Fermat’s Last Theorem leapt off the shelves in quantities so-called bestselling novelists can only dream about, publishers have been falling over themselves in the scramble to find the next slim tome that humanises some arcane corner of scientific research while flattering its readership into believing that they’ve acquired a […]
Tim Parks: Destiny
Stephen Mitchelmore I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth, or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply […]
Jeff Noon : Needle In The Groove : Liquid Culture
Antony Johnston discusses cities, prose remixing and the death of Vurt with Jeff Noon I meet Jeff Noon in his now-native Brighton, stepping off the two o’clock from Victoria to greet a man surprisingly recognisable from his dustjacket photographs, casually dressed and affable. You heard me. Jeff Noon, the man who made Manchester live, breathe […]
Joanne Harris: Chocolat
Simon Kirrane "Is this the best book ever written?” gushes one of the review quotes listed in the front of this paperback (The Literary fucking Review, who should know better). And not since The Wasp Factory have I seen a paperback’s early pages weighed down with such a mass of critical commentary. The inversion here […]
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein
Stephen Mitchelmore "I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face. No one else on all this earth had such features. This was the most amazing thing in the life of the world." These sentences come from the final page of Saul Bellow’s previous novel "The Actual", which, I seem to remember, he said […]
Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves
Gary Marshall House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel has been described as a "literary Blair Witch Project’ – a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with. The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a […]
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 […]
Alan Warner : The Sopranos : Existential Ecstasy
Zoe Strachan talks to Alan Warner about French intellectuals and the chemical generation genre ZS: Your story ‘After the Vision’ was in my opinion the best in the Children of Albion Rovers anthology produced by Rebel Inc. It says it was taken from something called The Far Places. Was this a novel? It seems to […]
William Gibson: All Tomorrow’s Parties
Chris Mitchell William Gibson is never going to be able to live down being the sci-fi author who coined the term "cyberspace". First used in his debut novel Neuromancer which was published during the early 1980s, it was soon picked up on as an uncannily accurate description of the then-emerging Internet. His latest novel is […]
Thom Jones – Sonny Liston Was A Friend Of Mine
OJ Irish If you don’t drink or smoke, reading Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine will make you wish you did. If, like most people, you do, then you’ll feel better about it and want to switch up to Jim Beam and Lucky Strikes immediately. Jones’ writing is what you might call ‘Zippo Prose’ […]
Douglas Coupland – Miss Wyoming
Gary Marshall With the success of Generation X, Douglas Coupland found himself in the role of spokesman for a disaffected generation, documenting the ennui of twentysomethings in a world where even the most radical youth movements are quickly co-opted and commercialised by the mainstream. Microserfs followed soon afterwards, a soap opera covering the tangled relationships […]
Joyce Maynard – At Home In The World
Bethan Roberts In the last couple of years there has been a shift in confessional writing from the craze for tortured self-absorption (from Elizabeth Wurtzel and Andrea Ashworth, amongst others) to the impulse to torture a friend/relative/lover, preferably a famous one. Joyce Maynard’s book, along with the du Pre siblings’ A Genius in the Family […]
Michael Marshall Smith – Spares
Antony Johnston They say never judge a book by its cover, but the sheer ubiquitousness of Spares (with its oh-so-cool spot-varnished, blurry-type cover) inclined me to think it was the sort of bestselling “new fiction” which generally leaves me cold. Fortunately for me, a friend had already read it and liked it so much that […]
Meera Syal: Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Bethan Roberts It’s a relief to find that once you get beyond the mouthful of a title, this second novel from the fantastically talented author of Anita and Me, Bhaji on the Beach and star of the rightly acclaimed BBC2 comedy series Goodness Gracious Me more than lives up to Meera Syal’s reputation. It tells […]
Jane and Anna Campion: Holy Smoke
Chris Mitchell Holy Smoke is the novel of Jane Campion’s soon to be released film, starring Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel. It’s an odd project, not only for being published before the film’s release (which says something about the literary pretensions of the director), but also for being a collaboration between two sisters. Challenging the […]
Salman Rushdie: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Tim Parks ‘I always thought storytelling was like juggling,’ says the main character in Rushdie’s novel Haroun, ‘You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you’re good you don’t drop any.’ In his new work, The Ground Beneath her Feet the Anglo-Indian author duly tosses […]
Hubert Selby : The Willow Tree : A Lightning Strike On The Retina
Thierry Brunet meets the uncompromising Hubert Selby Hubert Selby Jr is one of the most powerful American writers. Last Exit To Brooklyn, his first novel, was a best seller and the subject of an obscenity trial in England. The book was incendiary with its release in 1964. It’s a compassionate portrait of an overlooked America. […]
Barry Gifford: The Sinoloa Story
Jayne Margetts There is always beauty in violence, particularly when the written word is the vernacular. There are many kinds of perpetrators who wield the pen with the expertise of a dominatrix whipping her victim into submission; from James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard to the once savage and brutal Bret Easton Ellis (in his American […]
Alan Weisman: Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
Thomas Handy Loon Colombia’s Gaviotas is a community only dreamers could visualize, and only outcasts could build. Surrounded by rebel-infested llanos (savannas) and vast coca plantations, the presence of its peaceful rhythms and homegrown technologies is as hopeful as it is unlikely. A super- efficient pump fills water cisterns every time children play on the […]
Emily Jenkins: Tongue First: Adventures In Physical Culture
Jayne Margetts It’s no secret that the thought of wading through another chapter and verse of literary cultural dissection usually holds about as much appeal as taking a skinny dip in a bath full of female pythons with PMT. After all, how many book store shelves are stocked with feminist rant and rave from the […]
Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us
Antony Johnston One of Us. A powerful phrase — belonging, kinship, camaraderie. Familiar concepts, though this book deals with them in ways you may not expect. Initially our protagonist, Hap Thompson, seems anything but One of Us. An outsider, a loner with no life, an ex-wife, forced to live in exile from his hometown. The […]
Bruce Sterling: Distraction
Chris Mitchell If the novel of ideas has found a refuge within the 20th century, it’s within science fiction. Sci-fi lends itself perfectly to complex speculation about the future and what’s in store for the human race. The only problem is, sci-fi novels tend to function on such galactic-spanning levels that characters get reduced to […]
