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Found 279 articles.

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John Burnside - Glister

John Burnside - Glister

(4 stars)8 May 2008

SOCIAL DRAMA (Jonathan Cape) It’s safe to say this latest novel from Fifer John Burnside won’t be sparking a tourism boom on the east coast anytime soon. But his bleakly beautiful tale digs beneath the surface of the everyday to do what he does best…

Mark E Smith with Austin Collings - Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith

Mark E Smith with Austin Collings - Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith

(4 stars)8 May 2008

MUSIC BIOGRAPHY (Viking) The real joy of Mark E Smith and The Fall has always been expecting the unexpected. His music has always stuck to a rigid formula but is somehow never formulaic, and he’s survived every British musical subculture since punk…

Ed Park - Personal Days

Ed Park - Personal Days

(3 stars)8 May 2008

COMIC THRILLER (Jonathan Cape) Set in an unnamed New York company, Ed Park’s quirky debut begins like a Dilbert cartoon or a particularly deadpan episode of The Office. A group of interchangeably fireable wage slaves, their jobs ill-defined even to…

Garth Ennis

Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson - The Boys II

(4 stars)8 May 2008

SUPERHERO SATIRE (Titan) Some 20 years ago Alan Moore asked the question: ‘Who watches The Watchmen?’ Garth Ennis answers the question with this anarchic superhero satire about a gang of super-powered, CIA-backed thugs who police – with extreme…

John Miller - Secret Agent: Chronicles of Doom

John Miller - Secret Agent: Chronicles of Doom

(3 stars)8 May 2008

SPY SATIRE (Small Press) You can see the work of Edinburgh cartoonist John Miller on posters and adverts hanging in the city’s Deadhead Comics, but none hint at his proclaimed double life as the template for James Bond, with inspiration imparted to…

Jordan Crane - The Clouds Above

Jordan Crane - The Clouds Above

(3 stars)8 May 2008

FANTASY (Fantagraphics) American cartoonist Jordan Crane’s all-ages graphic novella first published in 2005 makes its paperback debut complete with five previously unseen pages. It’s actually a follow-up to the self-published and now out-of-print The…

Bedsit Journal

Richard Cowdry & Various - The Bedsit Journal No 2

(4 stars)8 May 2008

COMPILATION (Bedsit Journal) Marshalled together by the artist and writer Richard Cowdry whose previous comic seed bombs include Kartoon Cuts and Knucklehead, this funny, bitter and vulgar collection of new comic book talent proves what can be done…

Richard Mason - The Lighted Rooms

Richard Mason - The Lighted Rooms

(3 stars)8 May 2008

FAMILY DRAMA (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) The Lighted Rooms takes on a vast array of human experience from Boer War concentration camps and townships of modern-day Bloemfontein to commodities trading crises and antiseptic nursing homes in 21st century…

William Sutcliffe - Whatever Makes You Happy

William Sutcliffe - Whatever Makes You Happy

(3 stars)8 May 2008

FAMILY COMEDY (Bloomsbury) William Sutcliffe, Edinburgh-based spouse to Maggie O’Farrell and schoolmate of Ali G, is still best known for his 1997 coming of age debut Are You Experienced? Eleven years and three more books later, his fifth novel…

James Kelman

James Kelman - Kieron Smith, Boy

(3 stars)24 Apr 2008

POST-WAR NOVEL (Hamish Hamilton) James Kelman doesn’t have a reputation for writing easy-to-read books. Not necessarily a bad thing, since often the most rewarding fiction is the most demanding. Compared to his last two novels, Translated Accounts and…

Andrew Drummond

Andrew Drummond - Elephantina

(3 stars)24 Apr 2008

HISTORICAL TALE (Polygon) Scottish author Andrew Drummond has a strong reputation for writing comedic historical novels, and while this third book covers similar territory, it seems thinner on substance than his previous outings. Purporting to be the…

Brent Ghelfi - Volk’s Game

Brent Ghelfi - Volk’s Game

(2 stars)24 Apr 2008

CRIME THRILLER (Faber) This debut novel from former US Court of Appeals clerk Brent Ghelfi introduces us to Alexei Volkovoy. ‘Volk’ (‘wolf’), a one-time sniper for the Russian Army in Chechnya, is now an unscrupulous gangster commissioned to steal a…

Civil War: Iron Man

Civil War: Iron Man

(3 stars)24 Apr 2008

SUPERHERO (Marvel) He’s an Avenger; he’s been Secretary of Defence; he’s a member of the shadowy Illuminati. But nothing exemplifies Iron Man’s key position in the world of comics more than his role in Marvel’s huge crossover event of 2006, Civil…

The Invincible Iron Man

Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle

David Michelinie, Bob Layton & John Romita Jr

(4 stars)24 Apr 2008

SUPERHERO (Marvel) In the world of comics Iron Man is one of the main players in the Marvel Universe. As provisional leader of the Avengers for many, many years, he’s helped shape the fictional world more than most. However Iron Man hasn’t crossed…

Extremis

Iron Man: Extremis

Warren Ellis & Adi Granov

(5 stars)24 Apr 2008

SUPERHERO (Marvel) This is perhaps the classic modern Iron Man tale. Warren Ellis gets his grubby hands on Tony Stark and changes him forever. Here the Golden Avenger takes on bio-chemically altered terrorists, who possess more power than even his…

Steven Galloway - The Cellist of Sarajevo

Steven Galloway - The Cellist of Sarajevo

(3 stars)24 Apr 2008

WARTIME DRAMA (Atlantic) ‘It is a sad tune. But it doesn’t make me sad,’ someone said of the cellist who played Albinoni’s ‘Adagio’ for 22 days in remembrance of innocents killed while standing in a queue for bread. This is a sad book, but it might…

The Invincible Iron Man

The Invincible Iron Man

(2 stars)24 Apr 2008

DVD (12) 80 mins (Lionsgate) The new big budget feature isn’t the first Iron Man movie as this 2007 animated feature from Marvel proves. The film revisits Iron Man’s first showdown with the Mandarin. The animation is fine but overall the film…

Tim Winton - Breath

Tim Winton - Breath

(3 stars)24 Apr 2008

TEENAGER STORY (Picador) Tim Winton’s first novel for seven years is ostensibly a coming of age story which follows Bruce Pike (‘Pikelet’) from naïve and wild adolescence into emotionally maimed adulthood. Most of the time, however, Breath reads like…

Lorna Martin: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

(3 stars)16 Apr 2008

Lorna Martin's life is a mess – or so she thinks. By most people's standards the 30-something Glaswegian journalist has very little to worry about: she has a successful career with the Observer newspaper, earns a decent living and is perfectly healthy.

Joe Humphreys - Foul Play

Joe Humphreys - Foul Play

(3 stars)10 Apr 2008

SPORT HISTORY (Icon Books) With the protests surrounding the Beijing Olympics going into overdrive, disgraced sprinter Dwain Chambers seeking a new career in rugby league and the integrity of referees, umpires and line judges being called into…

Batman

Brian K Vaughan & Various - Batman: False Faces

(3 stars)10 Apr 2008

SUPERHERO (DC/Titan) Now better known for his Y: The Last Man, Pride of Baghdad and Ex-Machina titles as well as being one of the keys writers on TV’s Lost, Brian K Vaughan started off as a jobbing writer. With his star now well and truly established…

Chris Hannan - Missy

Chris Hannan - Missy

(2 stars)10 Apr 2008

HISTORICAL DRAMA (Chatto & Windus) Missy is the first novel by award-winning Scottish playwright Chris Hannan but on this evidence, he should most definitely return to the theatre. Set in 1860s California, we follow the trials and tribulations of Dol…

Tarkovsky

Film Books Round-Up

10 Apr 2008

The debate about US cinema from the late 1960s continues with Yale graduate Mark Harris’ Scenes from a Revolution (Canongate ••••). It starts with the fairly flaky premise that the 1967 Academy Award ceremony was the night that the new Hollywood was…

The Education of Hopey Glass

Jaime Hernandez - The Education of Hopey Glass

(4 stars)10 Apr 2008

SOCIAL DRAMA (Fantagraphics) This 24th collection of the three decades – and counting – run of Los Bros Hernandez’s seminal comic book series Love & Rockets, archives in handsome hardback 15 short stories focusing on the supporting and peripheral…

Joanne Proulx - Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

Joanne Proulx - Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

(3 stars)10 Apr 2008

TEEN DRAMA (Picador) Hot on the heels of Academy Award-winning comedy Juno comes another enjoyable tale of a smart-mouthed North American trying to make sense of the adult world. Joanne Proulx’s debut centres around Luke Hunter who, in the opening…

Found 279 articles.

Sorted by date / most viewed. Showing 10, 25, 50, 100 per page.

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