It’s difficult, unfortunately, to sit through the first twenty minutes of Ralph Fiennes’ modern rendering of Coriolanus without distraction. And these distractions do rather shake the whole project. The first distraction is that the shaven headed Fiennes’ looks uncomfortably like his recent portrayal of Voldemort in the Harry Potter films; a look that tends to […]
Archive | January, 2012
Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson, Twice in a Lifetime (Comma Press)
Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson is one of Iceland’s most practiced practitioners of short fiction, dedicating himself to the form long after his peers had moved onto writing novels. He too has now moved onto the longer form, but before he did so he published five volumes of short stories of which Twice in a Lifetime was […]
Mirja Unge, It Was Just Yesterday (Comma Press)
Mirja Unge’s debut collection of short stories achieved considerable success when it was published in Sweden. The sixteen stories that make up the collection bear striking similarities and preoccupations. Largely written as first-person narratives, they articulate the female adolescent view on life and relationships. The prose is sharp and abrupt and Unge does away with […]
Two Pamphlets from C. J. Allen and Adrian Buckner, reviewed by Ian Pople
C. J. Allen, Violets (Templar Poetry) £4.50 Adrian Buckner, Bed Time Reading (Five Leaves) £3.00 There is a breed of Englishman writing today whose work is very easily reviled; much like the ‘cowpat’ school of English composers of the 40s and 50s. In fact, the sound track to their poems is indubitably the andante second […]