Homes Away From Home at Manchester Literature Festival Event: David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October, 6:00pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation To the mild stupefaction of the staff in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, I arrive to this—the second event of the first day of the Manchester Literature Festival, and, incidentally, the first event of […]
The Heretic, The Lowry, reviewed by Amy Kilvington
The description of Richard Bean’s The Heretic as a ‘hilarious comedy’ rings true in The Library Theatre’s current production. Eccentric characters, clever scripting and an original angle all contribute to the success of the play, which received much audience appreciation throughout. Telling the story of Dr Diane Cassell, the black sheep of the science department […]
Two Collections from Paul Mills, reviewed by James McGrath
Paul Mills, Voting for Spring (Smith/Doorstop, £9.95) and You Should’ve Seen Us, (Smith/Doorstop) £6.95 Paul Mills, at a reading in York in the late 1990s, was the first writer I ever heard to suggest that the next major movement in poetry and also literary theory would have ‘something to do with the environment. It’s inevitable’. […]
Country Wife, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Naya Tsentourou
The Country Wife – Royal Exchange, Manchester Naya Tsentourou It’s not often that Restoration comedy arrives in Manchester. When it does, however, the genre’s poignant social critique, its unconventional values, and its celebration of playhouses find in the city’s culture a perfect fit. Polly Findlay’s production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, first performed in […]
Two Collections from Ian Parks, reviewed by Ian Pople
Ian Parks, The Landing Stage (Lapwing Press) £10.00; The Exile’s House (Waterloo House) £10.00 Parks is not afraid of the definite article; not only in the titles of his books, which also includes The Cage but also with the titles of the poems: ‘The Northern Lights’, ‘The Girl in the Garden’, ‘The March’. He also […]
Jules Smith, Looking for Larkin (Flux Gallery Press) £8.95
A couple of years ago, I took my son up to Hull University. It was an open day for potential Chemistry students, but in the middle of the opening presentation, the tutor showed a slide of ‘Hull’s Three Poets’.The slide was the famous picture of of Larkin, Andrew Motion and Douglas Dunn outside the University […]
James Fenton, Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968 – 2011 (Faber and Faber)
The quarrel isn’t often with the poems, though it can be; the quarrel often seems to be with Fenton as a purveyor of his own extravagant gifts as a poet. Because Fenton is always likely to be excising parts of his canon in ways that can seem supremely irritating to his many deep admirers. In […]
Evan Jones, Paralogues (Carcanet Press) £9.95
It would be too easy to point to the Evan Jones’ autobiography to find the dynamic for this book: a Canadian-Greek, resident in Manchester, married to a German. What would be more natural than for Jones to look at the world askew? And to view it from the various kinds of transport that take the […]
John Matthias, Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 2: 1995 – 2011 (Shearsman Books) £14.95
John Matthias is a kind of mid-Atlantic national treasure; he was born in Ohio, but married a woman from Hacheston, Suffolk and has spent most of his life shuttling between the two areas. And his status is such that celebratory volumes of essays have been published on him in both the UK and USA. But […]
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 […]
Terry Jones, Furious Resonance, Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series 5
How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going […]
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 […]
The Daughter-in-Law, The Lowry, reviewed by Howard Booth
Lawrence’s play The Daughter-in-Law is widely held to be one of the most important British plays written between the 1890s and the 1950s. Productions are not exactly ten a penny, so this one by Library Theatre at the Lowry was very welcome. Though excellent in some respects it did show that we still don’t have […]
Once upon a time in Anatolia (2011), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The Jury in Cannes were obviously feeling that films should be on the slow side last year. Having given the Palme D’Or to Terence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’, they gave the Grand Jury Prize to this very, very slow, exquisitely shot film from Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Ceylan’s film lives almost entirely in real time. […]
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 […]
Coriolanus (2011) dir. Ralph Fiennes
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 […]
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 […]
Dreams of a Life (2011), dir. Carol Morley
Dreams of a Life is a mesmerising film. It’s beautiful photography seems almost to belong to a different film, and it’s exquisite pacing and narrative arc show Carol Morley to have an iron control over her film. In part, the film comprises a series of talking heads of the ‘friends’ of Joyce Vincent, whose body […]
The Wind in the Willows, The Lowry
When I told my friends that I was going to see The Wind in the Willows, a few asked with disdain, “Is it a Christmas production?” They warned me that ‘tis the season for haphazard affairs thrown together for children who don’t know better and their desperate parents. I went to The Lowry with rather […]
Marcelijus Martinaitus, The Ballads of Kukutis (Arc Publications)
Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow and Kukutis […]
Soweto Kinch, Submotion Orchestra: Marsden Jazz Festival
When Soweto Kinch moved into his ‘free-styling’ rap, he elicited words from the audience that came from the letters of ‘Marsden’. The Marsden audience, part of the arc of Pennine post hippydom that runs from Hebden Bridge, through Todmorden, and Marsden to Mossley, initially gave him ‘melifluous’, ‘artisanal’, ‘sheep’, ‘dung’, ‘energy’ and, finally, ‘Northern’. Kinch, […]
Album Review: Thrice, Major/Minor, 2011 Vagrant Records
Album Review: Thrice, Major/Minor, 2011 Vagrant Records Major/Minor is the seventh full length from Irvine, California based quartet Thrice, produced by Dave Schiffman in LA who had previously worked with the band as an engineer and mixer on the albums Vheissu (2005) and Beggars (2009) respectively. In their thirteen years together Thrice have been uneasy […]
Stephanie Bolster, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books)
There is a tension at the heart of Stephanie Bolster’s wonderful new book. That tension is between the title with its huge inclusiveness and the contents of the book which is often, though not exclusively confined to zoos and their analogues. Bolster’s new collection is based around a central conceit of the zoo as a […]
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 […]
Ed Reiss, Your Sort (Smith/Doorstop) £9.95
Ed Reiss’s first book-length collection, Your Sort, is a wonderful addition to a body of English humorous writing that started with Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll and ends up in the Mighty Boosh having come via the Goon Show, but also the warm ‘Englishness’ of Men from the Ministry, and Round the Horne. And Reiss […]
Stuart McCullum: Manchester Jazz Festival, Royal Northern College of Music
Last year on this page, I reviewed guitarist Stuart McCullum’s last performance for the Manchester Jazz Festival. That performance was in the festival tent, and he was first on the bill with Trio VD and The Golden Age of Steam. Then he was performing solo with laptop and electronics. This year, launching his new album, […]
A Separation (2011), dir. Asghar Farhadi
Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent directorial debut asks one central question; how is it possible to take decisions and not be selfish, particularly in the family? When Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to take her daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) abroad for a better life, her husband, Nader (Peyman Moaadi), won’t go. His father to whom is devoted has […]