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 […]
Richard Witts – Artist Unknown: An Alternative History Of The Arts Council
Robin Askew "The Arts Council has piddled about in the cultural life of Great Britain for half a century." From this opening sentence, former arts administrator Richard Witts mounts a sustained attack on the cranky Council’s waste, incompetence and stupidity, gleefully exposing fiasco after fiasco until the reader begins to marvel that any art actually […]
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 […]
Marya Hornbacher : Marianne Apostolides : Wasted : Inner Hunger : Blame Culture
Elizabeth McCullough digests two takes on eating disorders in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted and Marianne Apostolides’ Inner Hunger Joining an abundance of self-help and resource manuals on the topic of anorexia and bulimia are two recent first-person accounts from sufferers of these disorders. Though speaking with very different voices, the authors of Inner Hunger and Wasted […]
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 […]
Sonic Youth: An interview with Thurston Moore
Andrew McCutchen meets Sonic Youth mainman and guitar torturer extraordinaire Thurston Moore “I moved to New York to fuck Patti Smith” writes Thurston Moore, going back, going way back to an epoch of rock history when Sid Vicious was at his most vicious, prowling the Village’s streets after Nancy’s brutal murder, when Lydia Lunch was […]
Paul Stump – Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music
Stephen Harper Yesterday, Bryan Ferry nearly killed me. Lost in the music on my car stereo, I took a sharp corner on the A7 south of Edinburgh at a foolish speed. Unable to turn quickly enough, I lost control of the car and skidded to a stop on the wrong side of a road, nanoinches […]
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 […]
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 […]
Arvo Pärt : Miserere : Miserere And Minimalism
Lewis Owens meets composer Arvo Pärt A few months ago, I contacted the composer Arvo Pärt through his publisher in Vienna. I informed Mr Pärt that I was interested in writing a book on his life and music. After reading my proposal, Mr Pärt suggested that we met to discuss things further. The first meeting […]
Kevin Mulroy : Western Amerykanski: Polish Poster Art & the Western : How The East Was Won
Jeffrey Sharlet charts the unlikely impact of Westerns on Polish poster art and politics Look up “Shane” (as in Alan Ladd) in a Polish literary dictionary, and you’ll find the following definition: “a psychologically credible personification of goodness.” The movie itself, when it played the Polish provinces, was titled The Man From Nowhere. To Polish […]
Jim DeRogatis : Paul Morley : Let It Blurt : Nothing : Critical Mass
Brian Dillon on the lifechanging journalism of Lester Bangs and Paul Morley Lou Reed’s magnificent “Rock’n’Roll” recounts the peculiar tale of a five-year-old girl living in a blank suburb where there’s ‘nothing happening at all … not at all … Then one fine day she turned on a New York station, she couldn’t believe what […]
Half Man Half Biscuit : Trouble Over Bridgewater
Gary Marshall If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the music business mean that the band who brought us the immortal lyric “God, I could murder a Cadbury’s Flake, but then […]
Illiad – Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell
Gary Marshall Even by the standards of American humour, Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell is unusual; a book of cartoons that should carry a set of minimum system requirements. Where Scott Adams’ Dilbert series concentrates more on universal office themes, with a worrying tendency to fill half of the books with new age self-help nonsense, […]
Julian Murphy : The Singular Art Of Julian Murphy : Hoover Groover
Robin Askew discovers why artist Julian Murphy turns household appliances into fetish objects of desire Bristolian born and bred, 40-year-old Julian Murphy studied Design for Print at Brunel College. His acclaimed fetish art, which he describes as “sciperepics”, transforms everyday household appliances into extraordinary objects of desire. Critics have compared Julian’s work to that of […]
Naomi Klein : No Logo : Ad Nauseum
Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo “If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself… there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves – it’s the only way to save your […]
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 […]
James Gleick: Faster
Chris Mitchell Faster is a survey of the speed of modern life. Subtitled "The acceleration of just about everything", it’s a book which takes time out to stop and think about the breakneck pace at which we live our lives and the ramifications of doing so. Unsurprisingly, technology has played a big part in increasing […]
Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant Than The Sun
Chris Mitchell Technology is often seen as having a negative influence on music. Ever since the advent of sound generated by machines rather than traditional instruments, there have been dire predictions about the death of the Song. More Brilliant Than The Sun takes the opposite attitude and celebrates these strange new technologically-based forms of music, […]
Toni Davidson: Scar Culture
Jayne Margetts Canongate’s Rebel Inc imprint has become the torchbearer for the Dysfunctional Generation. If grim reality, catharsis and profane verse is your poison then chances are they can prescribe a literary hotchpotch of cutting-edge contemporary writers to suit your taste buds. Feeling pessimistic or down-right suicidal then look no further than the critically lauded […]
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 […]
Tenement Sonata #2 – Lisa Stopless
My upstairs neighbors inspired me. Heard ’em packing up. Getting out. Rent’s late. Work’s slow. They’re fast. Heard ceiling scrape in dream. Woke up. Dark, still dressed. Head full. Power off. Milk lumpy. Sluggish panic. Man, this bites. Towel moldy. Called Devon. Collect. Sold the car. Sold the ounce of weed in the car. Sold […]
Tupac Shakur and Death Row Records : Have Gun Will Travel and Rebel For The Hell Of It : Murder Was The Case
Gary Marshall on the history of gangsta rap as documented in Tupac Shakur: Rebel For The Hell Of It and Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records Under the guidance of its founder Marion “Suge” Knight, Death Row Records became one of the most successful and most talked-about […]
