Fallen stock Tony’s out of the door and jogging across the yard before the trailer’s through the gate, a sheepdog worrying his ankles. A moment later his face is at Ed’s window, a tired moon in the dawn light. They’re up on the top fields. Do you need a hand getting out of the […]
Archive by Author
Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin (The Clerkenwell Press) £12.99
Lost Memory of Skin conveys the reader out of their comfort zone and into that area that all good fiction aspires to inhabit, full of challenging ideas and questions that brook no easy answers. In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may […]
Andy Warhol, Late Self-Portraits and Eduardo Paolozzi, Moonstrips Empire News, Graves Gallery, Sheffield
Andy Warhol: Late Self-Portraits is one of the smallest exhibitions I’ve seen recently. Being generous, it extends over two rooms of Sheffield’s Graves Gallery, but one of those rooms is in fact devoted to pictures of, and interviews with, people who knew Warhol. Nevertheless, the one room of self-portraits – paintings and photographs from the […]
Socrates Adams, Everything’s Fine (Transmission Print) £8.99
Charting the travails of a call-centre salesman suffering under a demented boss, Socrates Adams’ enviable debut takes its place in a line of bleak workplace satires that runs from ‘Bartleby’ through to Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, something like Douglas Coupland but far more surreal and far, far funnier. The novel begins with Ian, the hapless […]
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (4th Estate) £16.99
Chad Harbach’s hefty first novel is one of the major stories of this year’s literary scene: nine years in the making, sold for the kind of sum usually reserved for celebrities, and trailing laudatory quotes from luminaries such as Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney. It is then, something of a surprise to discover how dull […]
Metronomy: 21st September 2011, The Cockpit, Leeds
If Metronomy are disappointed at having missed out on the Mercury Prize to P. J. Harvey, they fail to show it in this frenetic, joy-inducing set. From the chugging guitar and swelling keyboard of hypnotic opening track ‘We Broke Free’, it’s clear that this band that started as a one-man outfit recording in a bedroom […]
René Magritte, The Pleasure Principle Tate Liverpool
Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition of René Magritte’s paintings and photographs is titled The Pleasure Principle after one of his paintings, but the idea of pleasure is one that permeates every work in this stunning exhibition. For it would take a particularly stony-faced gallery visitor not to break out into a smile at some point in […]
Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate) £12.99
Carol Birch’s Booker-longlisted novel will delight anyone who’s read Dickens or Melville or any of their contemporary imitators and wants a cross between a Bildungsroman and a good old adventure yarn. Or at least it will for the first half of the book anyway. The narrator, Jaffy Brown, a mix of Oliver Twist, Ishmael and […]
Saul Bellow, Letters ed. by Benjamin Taylor (Penguin) £30.00
Readers of Bellow’s novels will recognise the seeds of one of the twentieth century’s greatest prose writers from the very first letter, in which a callow Bellow declares ‘I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you.’ There is in that line not just a foreshadowing of […]
Sonic Youth, Manchester Academy, 30th December 2010
Sonic Youth’s gig at Manchester Academy sold out well before Christmas, so walking down a misty Oxford Rd to get to the academy building was to run a gauntlet of touts and mournful fans all desperately hoping for the miracle of a spare ticket. Inside, a packed crowd that ranged in age from teenagers to […]
Lee Rourke, The Canal (Melville House) £9.99
Rourke’s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour’s London. Its unnamed narrator, having recently resigned from his job, returns daily to the same bench and watches the swans and the coots and the slick-suited workers going about their business […]
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (Faber) £8.99
Byrne’s half-travelogue, half-pro-cycling-manifesto is probably not, unfortunately, the magic book that will persuade car owners to leave their vehicles at home, bus drivers to give cyclists an extra foot of room, Jeremy Clarkson to take a monastic vow of silence, or any of the other things that would make life safer and more enjoyable for […]
Arshile Gorky, A Retrospective/Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde, Tate Modern, London
If there’s some bad news for art lovers who haven’t been to London recently, it’s that there’s less than a month left to see the Arshile Gorky retrospective at Tate Modern. The good news is that there are seven weeks left to see its partner exhbition, Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde. The Gorky exhibition […]
Perrier’s Bounty (2009), dir. Ian Fitzgibbon
With the summer blockbuster season still some way off, it’s possible that there may yet be a worse film released this year, but they’re going to have to try particularly hard to sink to lower depths than Perrier’s Bounty. Set in contemporary Dublin, this shockingly clichéd film follows Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) through 48 hours […]
James Kelman, If it is your life (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
After the sprawling trawl through Glaswegian boyhood that was Keiron Smith, Boy, James Kelman returns to the short form with a new collection of stories, If it is your life. As ever with Kelman, the writing is sharp, blackly funny and masterfully aware of rhythm. But it also gives the reader a clear impression that […]
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
There aren’t many books like Paul Murray’s new novel Skippy Dies. It looks different for a start: instead of the hardback you’d expect for the RRP, you get a boxed set of three beautifully designed paperbacks titled Hopeland, Heartland, and Ghostland and Afterland instead. At about 220 pages long, they’re perfect to slip into the […]
Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums (Granta) £7.99
For a language that bears such a close relation to English, German has been poorly served by translations. Compared to, for example, the ease with which French or Spanish has been rendered, translations of German have often seemed heavy and cumbersome, as if it was being translated into a language that looked and sounded like […]
Carlos Fuentes, Happy Families (Bloomsbury) £8.99
One thing connects the sixteen stories in Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families: despair at the state of modern Mexico. The first story’s ‘family like any other’ live mostly in separate rooms, clinging to fantasy notions of both their country and their chances within it. Elsewhere we see corrupt priests, faded actors, lovers separated by the expectations […]
E. L. Doctorow, Homer and Langley (Little Brown) £11.99
When John Updike died last year, various critics suggested that Philip Roth was the last remaining of the great American novelists. Even at the time, this was hard to take at face value. It seemed nothing more than a kneejerk reaction from the same critics whose glowing reviews of Roth’s annual postings from the frontiers […]
John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London
Walking around London at present, it’s easy to think that Pop Life is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons’ silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko’s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. Were this the case, you might feel ready to […]
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Jonathan Cape) £18.99
For readers whose wrists are still aching from nursing Thomas Pynchon’s previous novel, the gargantuan Against the Day, Inherent Vice – his latest bulletin from his own alternative version of America – may have arrived with unseemly haste. Yet at a mere 369 pages, this new work is not only lighter in terms of its […]
Sin Nombre (2009), dir. Cary Fukunaga
With so much debate today focussing on immigration, it seems strange that so few films have looked at the topic. Hollywood rarely goes near it for anything other than a new slant on romantic comedy (remember Green Card?) and Michael Winterbottom’s In this world remains a fairly rare instance in European cinema. Yet the immigrant […]
Broken Embraces – Abrazos rotos, (2009) dir. Pedro Almodovar
Ever since taking the best foreign picture Oscar for Todo Sobre mi Madre, Pedro Almodóvar has seen anything he does loved by the majority of his fans, regardless of its actual quality. His films can belabour under ridiculous plots or drift along without even the merest hint of narrative progression, and praise will still be […]
Mark Wallinger curates The Russian Linesman; Leeds City Art Gallery
In our era of shows curated with an exhaustive, almost claustrophobic, focus on a single artist or art movement, Mark Wallinger’s show The Russian Linesman at Leeds Art Gallery is a rare beast. Touring after a stint at the Hayward in London, the show takes in sculpture, painting, drawing and video art, and ranges in […]
James Fleming, Cold Blood (Jonathan Cape) £16.99
Ian Fleming is reputed to have said that he wrote the James Bond books for warm-blooded, heterosexuals to read on trains. In Cold Blood, his nephew James Fleming takes that one step further by writing a book that will not only appeal to the same readership, but whose subject is warm-blooded, heterosexual and actually on […]
Encounters at the End of the World (2007), dir. Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog’s new film is a documentary about workers on a scientific research base in Antarctica. It has many of the hallmarks of his previous documentary work, including stunning panoramic shots, the vaguely creepy off-camera voice that sounds like it could be enticing Hansel and Gretel to come into the gingerbread house, and, of course, […]
John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems (Hamish Hamilton) £12.99
The cover of John Updike’s final book bears two phots of the author: the one on the inside of the fly leaf is taken by his wife Martha, and shows a smiling Updike, presumably caught in an unguarded moment of familial intimacy; the Jill Krementz photo that forms the cover is a more familiar Updikean […]
The Burning Plain (2008), dir. Guillermo Arriaga
There are some writers whose work is identifiable within the space of a couple of sentences. Guillermo Arriaga makes his directorial debut with The Burning Plain, but it’s a film that’s also almost instantly identifiable, bearing as it does the same hallmarks as the numerous films he’s written. Anybody who’s seen Babel, The Three Burials […]
Glen Duncan, A Day and A Night and A Day (Simon & Schuster) £14.99, 241pp
The time of Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9/11 and America is nervy. Augustus Rose, a mixed race sixties radical, has infiltrated a group of extremists in the hope of avenging the death of his lover Selina in a fictional 2002 bomb in El Corte Ingles in […]
Rodchenko & Popova, Tate Modern, London
The posters for last year’s Royal Academy exhibition From Russia bore a Matisse painting as their crowd-grabbing image. In doing so, they were, unwittingly or not, reflecting the unspoken theory that most of the decent art in Russia is actually non-Russian, the spoils of World War Two. Russians, it seems, are allowed to do novels, […]
Let the Right One In – Låt den rätte komma in (2008), dir. Tomas Alfredson
For many years, two things associated with Sweden – the prospect of assembling flat pack furniture, and anything to do with ABBA – have been enough to make me break out into a cold sweat. So I approached the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In with some trepidation, especially as the average horror […]
Ross Raisin, God’s Own Country (Penguin)
Ross Raisin’s debut novel takes its title from the not always ironic way that Yorkshiremen of a certain age refer to their own county. Set in the wilderness of the North Yorks Moors and narrated by Sam Marsden, a nineteen-year-old whose reliability we are never entirely certain of, it combines elements of comedy, suspense and […]
Che: Part One (2008), dir. Steven Soderbergh
In Walter Salles’ road movie The Motorcycle Diaries, Gael Garcia Bernal portrayed the young Che Guevara as a well-meaning medical student developing a sense of social justice as he rode through South America. In Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Part One, Benicio Del Toro tackles the arguably much more difficult task of portraying Guevara as the iconic […]
Late Rothko, Tate Modern, London
Poor Mark Rothko. An intensely private individual whose brooding canvases are enough to reduce one to existential uncertainty (why is that painting moving?), has been rendered banal by over-reproduction of his works – a framed, poster-sized reproduction of sunshine yellow and burnt orange hanging on the wall is as predictable an element of a dinner […]
Cold War Modern, Design 1945-1970, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Five years ago the V&A attracted bumper crowds for its Art Deco exhibition, with sellout crowds flocking to see the eclectic mix of everything from footage of Josephine Baker dancing to radio sets the size of an average sideboard. Using the same template of a mix of everything from cars to posters, the museum has […]