Chris Mitchell Dr Kimberly Young has made something of a name for herself in the last few years with her research into the phenomenon of Internet addiction. Having set up the Centre for On-line Addiction and written numerous papers about Internet addicts over the last three years, Caught In The Net is a distilled account […]
Scott Adams: Dilbert Seven Years Of Highly Defective People
Chris Mitchell Dilbert is rapidly becoming enough of a cartoon icon to rival the fame of Disney’s most enduring creations. Chronicling the trials of a hapless IT engineer battling against the absurdities of corporate life, the Dilbert comic strip appears in over 1500 newspapers worldwide. Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is creator Scott Adams’ […]
Will Self: Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Robert Clarke In his new collection of short stories, Will Self once more welcomes us to the terrifyingly trenchant world of the literary recusant. With his usual irreverent wit and unrestrained surrealism, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys sees Self move from the ridiculous to the downright absurd through a mixture of high art […]
Jim Crace: Quarantine
David B. Livingstone For some strange reason, the story of Christ – and the stories of messiahs in general – remain a source of irresistable fascination to a certain breed of author, seemingly inviting compulsive retelling and reinterpretation, despite both the difficulty of the subject matter and almost-certain censure by the devout (see Salman Rushdie). […]
Will Self : Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys : Pre-Millennium Tension
Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist No other author in recent years has divided the critics with such relish as Will Self. With, three novellas and two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, he has established himself […]
John L. Casti: The Cambridge Quintet
Chris Mitchell When world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue II last year, it provoked a renewed popular interest in the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Kasparov commented that he felt he was playing “an alien intelligence”. But was Deep Blue really thinking or simply number-crunching at a incredible speed to produce […]
Geoff Ryman: 253
Chris Mitchell Despite appearing in print for the first time this month, Geoff Ryman’s 253 is not a new book. This self-styled “interactive novel” has been available on the Internet since 1996 at http://www.ryman-novel.com, and its electronic success has prompted the “print re-mix” version to be published. The original Internet version of 253 was not […]
Melanie McGrath : Hard, Soft And Wet: Doing It For The Kids
Chris Mitchell meets Melanie McGrath, chronicler of the Digital Generation The days of travel writing being produced by someone wearing a pith helmet and clutching a pink gin are thankfully over. The new generation of travel writers are increasingly venturing into uncharted territories, as Melanie McGrath’s new book Hard, Soft And Wet demonstrates. No, it’s […]
Arthur C. Clarke : 3001: The Final Odyssey : The Final Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke on life, the universe and everything Spike note: This interview was released as part of the PR package for Clarke’s most recent book, 3001: The Final Odyssey. Therefore it’s appeared in several places before. However, since interviews with Clarke these days are rare, it seemed foolish not to reproduce it here. Transcript […]
Joey Anuff, Ana Marie Cox: Suck: Worst Case Scenarios In Media, Culture, Advertising and The Internet
Chris Mitchell Suck has long been the sardonic scourge of the internet. Under the slogan “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”, the Suck website serves up a free daily dose of mordant satire, analysis and “buzzsaw journalism” about the most recent media occurrences. It’s a recipe which has made Suck popular across the […]
Allen Ginsberg : Cosmopolitan Greetings : Cosmopolitan Greetings
Graham Duff meets Allen Ginsberg, the self styled “old auntie of the Beat Generation” Allen Ginsberg – poet, Jew, Buddhist and self styled “old auntie of the Beat Generation” – is 68 years of age. Forty years on from the publication of Ginsberg’s infamous Howl, his latest collection, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Writings from 1986-92, has just […]
Mark Slouka: War Of The Worlds: The Assault On Reality
Chris Mitchell If Mark Slouka is to be believed, we are losing our grip on reality. With the proliferation of technologies that allow us to immerse ourselves in artificially created worlds – from radio and television through to virtual reality and cyberspace – the line between real reality and artificial reality is blurring. Soon, Slouka […]
David Lavery: Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files
Chris Mitchell Just what is it that makes The X-Files so popular? The television show which revolves around the investigations of FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully into all things paranormal has become incredibly popular, narrating their quest for the ever-elusive truth through a combination of police drama, gothic horror and science fiction. Deny […]
J.G. Ballard : David Cronenberg’s Crash : Future Shock
Chris Hall finds out why J.G. Ballard thinks Crash is the first film of the 21st century One week before David Cronenberg’s Crash opened in the UK at the beginning of June, the normally reclusive author J.G. Ballard appeared at a regional press conference and pre-screening of the film in Wardour Street, London. Cronenberg’s film […]
E.M Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond
Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran refuses explanation “Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system.” What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a […]
Nicholas Blincoe: Jello Salad: John L. Williams: Faithless
Jason Weaver sees two very different sides of London in Nicholas Blincoe’s Jello Salad and John L. Williams’ Faithless What is there to say about Jello Salad by Nicholas Blincoe? Well, there’s a bit of sex, and a lot of drugs and even more violence. Blincoe’s characters do things to the body that will never […]
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 […]
Jeff Noon: Nymphomation
Chris Mitchell After giving Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland electric shock treatment last year in Automated Alice, Jeff Noon’s new novel Nymphomation returns to the near-future Manchester of his first two books, Vurt and Pollen. While Automated Alice was an audacious exercise in seeing quite how far he could push reinventing a classic, Nymphomation sees […]
Tibor Fischer: The Collector Collector
David B. Livingstone here are going to be people who’ll complain that this book and its author are just a little bit too clever for their own good. In The Collector Collector, Tibor Fischer strains suspension of disbelief to within millimeters of its snapping point, thanks to a presumptuous – and on the surface, unpromising […]
Thomas Pynchon: Mason And Dixon
David Livingstone Brevity, the aphorism has it, is the soul of wit. So where does that leave Thomas Pynchon, whose current offering Mason & Dixon weighs in at close to eight hundred pages – and of often-impenetrable stylized “old english” text, no less? The real Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, America’s original sub-dividers, took upon […]
Gary Indiana: Resentment
David B. Livingstone Historically, the turn of centuries and millenniums have marked periods of heightened popular anxiety, social unrest, collective madness, and religious mania. From the vantage point of 1997, a little less than two and a half years from two-thousand-zero-zero, our own age seems little different: Heaven’s Gaters are hopping aboard Hale-Bopp, militia types […]
Trainspotting: The Play : Expletives Repeated
Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspottinghas taken the theatre world by storm. Chris Mitchell discusses censorship, sincerity and swearing with the director. [Note: this interview is about the original stage production of Trainspotting in 1996. Spike also has another interview with Harry Gibson on the 10th anniversary stage production of Trainspotting in 2006.] […]
Marie Darrieussecq : Pig Tales : Shelf Life
Chris Hall gives the lowdown on Marie Darrieussecq Who’s Marie Darrieussecq? The 28-year-old author of debut novel Pig Tales, which has taken France by storm. The book took just 24-hours to be accepted after she sent her unsolicited manuscript to publishers Big deal. Well, quite. It’s sold a staggering 250,000 hardback copies and has been […]
Toby Litt : Beatniks : Shelf Life
Chris Mitchell gives the lowdown on Toby Litt Who’s Toby Litt? “Britain’s answer to Douglas Coupland“, according to various critics. “If you don’t want to be him or have him, you’re dead” drooled Julie Burchill with her characteristic understatement Our very own homegrown Generation X guru, then? Last year’s debut short story collection Adventures In […]
The Sugar Mummy: Bertie Marshall
Psychoboys is set in the cities of Moscow and Berlin. It tells the story of Rez, a rent boy living on the streets, and his fight for survival in a world of bizarre strangers. He meets a riot of characters – Ms Thing, a transvestite sugar mummy who educates him in the art of coprophilia […]
