To second Martin’s Lawrence Block appreciation below – I am a dipper into detective fiction and it only really sticks when I hit a character I like. Chip Harrison was the clincher for me, a bumper library collected edition with a ridiculo[…]

‘Council’ Tasked: Dee O’Connell’s irritation at people using “pram face” or “council” as insults is something I can definitely sympathise with. I don’t think it’s the ‘new racism&#8217[…]

The artwork for Closer was delivered to Factory Records two months before Ian Curtis’s suicide. Hyperreal Gothic statuary, tombstone typography: you can call this the “Premonition of Genius”, if you find any use for such ideas. Or y[…]

There aren’t many online pages about Robert Kanigher, and given that he died last year most of what Google turns up are obituaries. Entirely properly, these tend to stress his many worthy and creative achievements in comics and don’t writ[…]

A corollary about genre fiction (following from my Block-blog below): there are genre fans who are uninterested in the works admired by people who are more general fans of the medium, SF fans dismissive of Dick, Delany or Ballard and so on, for their[…]

Lawrence Block and the continuing unease of genre
Although it seems as if these days almost every literary commentator acknowledges that genre fiction can be as good as fiction in the literary mainstream, it’s just lip service. Nods are made to[…]

What a good idea: Smoke is a London fanzine. Not a fanzine about dodgy London pop music but a fanzine about London itself. Perhaps it has pretensions to be a literary magazine, but it neatly sidesteps them by billing itself as ‘A London Peculia[…]

Kathleen Kiirik Bryson’s Wilderness
Prowler Stores, Kings X, London, til 8th September
The exhibition here covers roughly a decade of one person’s need to create images. A series of mental collages, hybrid beings and iconic wicked-women, […]

(until 27 September.)
Sorry to say, but the Fruitmarket’s festival exhibition leaves me cold this year. I’m sure I’ll end up popping back in, so I’ll get a chance to think again, but today the work of the four female photograp[…]

…but the selling of a comic intended for an adult readership to its target audience is now an illegal act in the US. Those who’ve been following the Jesus Castillo case will have a clearer idea of what I’m talking about. The Supreme[…]