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[…]

Sad tale: I am sure that many of the comics creators I grew up reading are now poor as a church mouse, but unlike most of them Messner-Loebs was actually very good, and read as likeable as this story makes him seem. Strong characters, quirky and surp[…]

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[…]

The Politics Of The Future I: Science fiction is often not THAT speculative about science. Postulating future politics is almost as much fun. Perhaps for satirical effect, or for plot reasons, or just for fun: mooting a future society does mean gett[…]

Joe Sacco watch your back. After allowing an admittedly sluggish time for your Sacco’s graphic novel journalism of Palestine to be diseminated, the Israeli’s strike back with HOMELAND: THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

And […]

CBB5*: PUBLIC IMAGE LTD:
i. treble turner prizes all round ii. i spose to be on top of the FACTS i shd actually read everything written by and abt GG’s involvement and exit: from a semi-distance (ie i only watched the tv bits) i deduce that (c[…]

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 […]

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[…]

h.potter rural industry salvation shockah:
“Unexpected factors come into play, such as the buoyant country house market, the rise of ‘green’ consumerism, the influence of TV gardening personalities – even a welcome boost to b[…]

Light by M. John Harrison
It’s hard to avoid wordplay in talking about this: it’s a dazzling, brilliant novel. It’s the most successful fiction I’ve ever seen at embedding quantum physics, on every level – it’s dee[…]