Found 44 articles.
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9 May 2008
HarperCollins UK has released its new social networking site Authonomy in private beta. The book publisher first announced the initiative in October 2007, and the site was expected to launch in early 2008. Authonomy aims to connect aspiring authors…
1 Nov 2007
‘Ah, well. If you’re Scottish, and you’re writing crime fiction, at some point someone is going to hail you as “the new Ian Rankin” until they remember, no, actually Ian Rankin is still there. Alex Gray has been described as the Glaswegian Ian Rankin.
20 Sep 2007
Claire Sawers meets Alasdair Gray at his Glasgow home and finds that he has created yet another iconic, naïve and semi-tragic anti-hero.
In the current Marvel universe, Captain America is dead. Still, that doesn’t stop him being reincarnated when David Morrell – the novelist who created Rambo – comes calling for a scripting job. The majority of this first issue of six is about as…
Best known for The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje provides another trademark non-linear narrative, attempting to create a whole out of disparate story strands, but with rather limited success. On a Californian farm, Anna, adopted sister Claire and…
Sam is 15. He skates, chases girls and narrates his own coming-of-age novel. Things are going well until he gets one of those girls pregnant and is introduced to the world of adult responsibility. Plus, his father figure is a poster of pro-skater Tony…
The confessions of a self-justified jerk-off continue in this follow-up to The Poor Bastard, which collects the next four issues of Matt’s ongoing comic Peepshow. If anything, Spent (as in ejaculated and knackered) is an even more brazenly confessional…
Rick Geary has produced stories and art for everyone from Heavy Metal and National Lampoon to Disney. However, recently he’s been focusing on his ‘Treasury of Victorian Murder’, which has covered Jack the Ripper through to The Murder of Abraham Lincoln…
With a title like that and these spooky stories being told to a boy called Edgar, it’s hard not to think that this is a tribute to the creator of literary chillers, Mr Poe. And while reading this, it’s highly conceivable to hear the liquidy tones of…
6 Sep 2007
BLACK COMEDY When Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker came up with Nathan Barley on Channel 4 a couple of years back, many people were perturbed that its main sticking point was in poking fun at a group who seemed no longer ripe for satire. Surely…
SOCIAL FABLES The Stone Gods offers up four stories about civilisations destroying themselves, and the individuals who find unconventional love among the ruins. Some of these work better than others, with Winterson ill at ease and over-explaining…
LIFESTYLE TALE Your response to this book by London lifestyle journalist and publisher Neil Boorman is likely to correspond directly with your attachment to the very thing it challenges: brands, and the emotionally loaded consumerist machinery that…
POLITICAL THRILLER After being serialised in The Observer in 2006, Irish author Ronan Bennett’s thriller of politics, psychoanalysis and chess gets a fully bound release. It’s 1914. Russia is under the thrall of singularly powerful men, the…
23 Aug 2007
Dramatic career shifts don’t come more eye-opening than the transition from author to stand-up comic. But that’s the move AL Kennedy made over a year ago and she has gone on to prove to be just as adept in her new job. For this event, she will talk…
Alan Bennett’s latest work is a charmingly subversive novella in which the Queen develops a taste for reading. She stumbles upon the Westminster travelling library thanks to her ill-mannered corgis, and swiftly moves from a determined and dutiful…
In the space of 24 hours, Ann Patchett’s Run covers an entire social spectrum: interracial relationships, Catholicism and its validity, familial conflict, economic and class equality, and political ethics. This is a hefty fallout from a single event for…
Craig Davidson doesn’t pull any punches. We might as well get the terrible boxing pun out the way at the start, because his debut novel, The Fighter, is a brutally violent but brilliantly written tale set in the world of underground bare-knuckle…
For any writer who spends most of their time away all on their own in a darkened corner, it’s essential to have a release and to get some thoughts on their work from people they know and trust. For an author such as Ewan Morrison, dubbed notoriously as…
5 words to describe your latest book, The Post-Birthday World? Fun, funny, painful, warm (for once), and bittersweet. 4 authors who you think should be more famous than they are now? Richard Yates, Maria McCann, Peter Cameron and Robert…
Nathan Englander, the New York-born author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, makes a confident leap from critically acclaimed short story writer to novelist with the audacious The Ministry of Special Cases. It's set in 1970s Buenos Aires during…
For his new novel Spook Country, William Gibson has written a frightening dispatch from the zeitgeist with a plot that’s as outlandish as the technical and cultural details are convincing. The subliminal hum of Gibson’s influence will doubtless ensure…
16 Aug 2007
When the movie of Morvern Callar opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival back in 2002, there was much talk that this would be the first of many film adaptations of Alan Warner’s work. Frankly, the thought of anyone trying to get a script out of…
SOCIAL THRILLER Conspiracy, murder and music make an intoxicating combination, and Dreda Say Mitchell uses them to wonderful effect in this hugely enjoyable second effort. Following on from the success of the award-winning Running Hot, Killer Tune…
Marina Lewycka’s debut A History of Tractors in Ukrainian won over hearts and minds with a witty and largely autobiographical tale of a long settled immigrant family clashing over the encroaching senility of its obsessive and stubbornly romantic head.
‘Write about what you know’ is perhaps the most cogent piece of advice given to aspiring authors. Pakistan-born, Harvard-educated novelist Mohsin Hamid set out to do just that with his follow-up to the critically acclaimed Moth Smoke, penning a book…
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