King Rat by China Mieville
I’ve enthused wildly over his second and third novels (Perdido Street Station and The Scar) here, and finally got around to his first. The others are set in SF-fantasy worlds, while this one is in London, but hardly t[…]

Plowing The Dark by Richard Powers
I was discussing spoilers yesterday with Anthony Easton. This was in the context of movie reviews, but it had been on my mind thinking about this novel that I had just finished. The main strand is of a bunch of hots[…]

Takako Araki

I still get very frustrated by the web sometimes. I guess if I weren’t the kind of person who desperately wants to know more about a particular modern Japanese ceramic artist, and would stick with porn and Lord Of The Rings, I&#82[…]

Translated Accounts by James Kelman
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. It’s a bunch of short pieces, fragments, from a handful of narrators (three or four, the back cover says, and I’ll take its word for it), about living u[…]

Adventures In The Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes
Hawkes had been on my mental list for a while, since he seemed to be grouped with some Postmodernist writers I love – there are blurbs on the back of this from Barth, Gass and Barthelme, rathe[…]

The Key 20th C Artists, as proven by science
So I have this Phaidon book, The 20th Century Artbook. It has one page each, a reproduction and brief text, on 500 20th C artists. Each entry also has 3-6 other artists from the book mentioned as links &#8[…]

I can’t remember who it was who recommended Pelecanos to me, but I had the impression he was well worth a try, that he might just be someone to join my other big favourite current crime writers. This is pretty good, but nothing has really made […]

Chemical Brothers – Push The Button
The big UK dance acts of the ’90s are fading. Underworld’s last album was their weakest yet. Massive Attack’s last two (including Danny The Dog) are pretty poor. The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim […]

Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez
My favourite Christmas present from last month was this collection of all of Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories from the original run of Love & Rockets, a hardback volume with over 500 pages of comics. Like mo[…]

Council Estate Of Mind – Skinnyman
A bit late, in that it came out last year, but I’ve only just got it, and really want to give it a bit of a push. I think it’s the best straight hip hop album produced in the UK last year (that is,[…]