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 […]
“Colm Tóibín in Conversation” with Alan Hollinghurst, October 10th 2011
Acclaimed novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín, newly appointed as Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, hosts the first in a series of high-profile public events. The conversations cover topics of current literary and cultural interest. In this first event Colm Tóibín welcomes English novelist, and winner of the […]
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 […]
Pearl, trans. by Jane Draycott (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Jane Draycott’s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a […]
Roy Fisher, Selected Poems ed. August Kleinzahler (Flood Editions)
The first thing to say is that Fisher’s texts have never been as well served on the page as they are here. The poems are given real space and the movement of Fisher’s breath, rhythm and cadence is as clear as it possibly could be. Fisher has found a publisher who has finally done him […]
Attack the Block (2011), dir. Joe Cornish
Attack the Block is that increasingly rare thing; a terrific British comedy. It’s a film that balances a sharp, critical social conscience about life for young London boys with no real male role models, with very slickly handled, alien invasion movie. And if that sounds like Shane Meadows meets ET then try to forget that […]
Pharoah Sanders Quartet; Band on the Wall, Manchester
Tenor sax giant, Pharoah Saunders came to Manchester on the first of May channelling the spirit and legacy of his great mentor, John Coltrane. The first half of the concert was all Coltrane favourites: Giant Steps, Naima and then, My Favourite Things. Sanders is obviously not as agile on his pins as he once was, […]
Raphael Saadiq: Stone Rollin’. Columbia
There’s a determinedly retro feel to much of Raphael Saadiq’s new album. The cover shows Saadiq in roll-neck sweater with drums and bass accompaniment playing at a party full of beehive hairdo’s, and preppies in bow ties. And much of the music harks back to the early Motown and Stax days. Tracks like ‘Heart Attack’, […]
King Lear, The Lowry
Two or three thin, reedy notes are looped through the Lyric Theatre’s sound system prior to the evening’s performance of the Donmar’s King Lear, they alternate, sometimes create intervals with each other like strange, invisible wind chimes. Audience members are expectant but seem perturbed, no doubt the desired effect of this pre-performance touch. Two middle-aged […]
Two Collections from Don Coles
Don Coles, A Dropped Glove in Regent Street (Signal) Don Coles Where We Might Have Been (Signal) Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations […]
Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber) £9.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Of Mutability is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. “Procedure”, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, […]
Cat’s Eyes, St. Philip’s Church Salford, 14 March 2011
When I booked to see Faris Badwan’s Cat’s Eyes play the beautiful St. Phil’s in Salford I admit I was hoping for spectacle. The Horrors’ frontman and his skinny jeans, playing with a classically-trained multi-instrumentalist, in one of the city’s oldest churches, with his big hair – it’d take someone much less gothically-inclined than me […]
Henry Purcell The Fairy Queen : Philip Pickett The New London Consort
Had Purcell and his anonymous librettist been working in the twenty first century, they would have been had up by the Advertising Standards Authority. There is little or no resemblance between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and this semi-staged opera. In the late sixties the Purcell Society published a comparison between the Shakespeare and the […]
Brighton Rock (2010), dir. Rowan Joffe
Donald Davie described Larkin’s poetry as a ‘poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations.’ By setting his version of Graham Greene’s novel in the summer of 1964, Rowan Joffe sets the film at a moment when society was moving between that lowered vision, and the newer world of the ‘swinging sixties’. Thus, Joffe pitches […]
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 […]
Modern Canadian Poets: An anthology of Poems in English, ed. by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet) £18.95
An anthology of Canadian poetry published by a British publisher, and edited by two Canadian ex-pats does have an in-built advantage. On this side of the great pond, at least, the readership won’t be party to the inevitable cries of foul play over the absences and inclusions, and, to a lesser extent, the editors won’t […]
Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives (2010), dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Beloved of Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are deeply arthouse. Since Blissfully Yours from 2002 won ‘Un Certain Regard’, Weerasethakul’s films have won prize after prize at festivals all over Europe, and Uncle Boonmee won the director the Palme Dor, this year. Weerasethakul is one of those directors for whom linear narrative seems an impediment rather […]