Books and Paul Dale

Film books round-up

The Man in the Seventh Row, Cinema: The Whole Story, Hitchcock’s Magic and more reviewed

16 Nov 2011

Brian Pendreigh must surely be the hardest working movie-mad journalist and writer in Scotland. The Man in the Seventh Row (Blasted Heath ●●●) is his seventh book following biographies of Ewan McGregor and Mel Gibson, as well as Scottish cinema and…

Craig Collins & Iain Laurie - Roachwell

A dark, funny and disturbing achievement in self-published comics

24 Aug 2011

(roachwell.blogspot.com) Published online between 2009 and 2010, Roachwell is a fevered and messy collection of obtuse, amusing strips by Scottish writer/artists Craig Collins and Iain Laurie. Cremation and regeneration, house-hunting in the freak…

Books on cinema - round-up

How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, Tough Without A Gun, The Faber Book of French Cinema

23 May 2011

As is always the way in Scotland, summer is kind of here, and now is the time to lie in the grass with that growing pile of tosh novels. But let’s face it, you are going to win a lot more kudos from your film-obsessed mates if you create a tower of…

Arthur Flowers & Manu Chitrakar: I See the Promised Land

Mystical graphic novelisation inspired by the life Martin Luther King

24 Mar 2011

(Tara Books) The life and times of saints and heroes have long been the base for storytelling traditions. With I See the Promised Land, African-American writer and blues singer Arthur Flowers repositions civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s story…

Sophie Crumb - Evolution of a Crazy Artist

11 Feb 2011

(WW Norton) From an early age, Robert Crumb’s maladjusted scion was the beneficiary of her parent’s archivist tendencies. His daughter’s ‘most interesting and expressive work’ was saved and now, 26 years later, the artist child revisits it and lays…

Sex in art: Four examples of Scottish eroticism

The Wicker Man, Young Adam, Love Made Easy and The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania

1 Feb 2011

You can find good examples of Scottish eroticism without having to wallow through smut. The List picks four artworks that are worth seeking out for some homegrown, highbrow kicks

The Hot 100 2010 - Mark Millar, Kevin Bridges and Alasdair Gray take top 3 spots

Our annual chart of the people from Scotland being interesting, successful and creative

16 Dec 2010

The Hot 100 is a list of Scots who’ve made a sizeable creative splash in 2010. It includes musicians, artists, writers, actors, fashion designers, technological innovators, shop owners, festival directors, record label heads and one mad cyclist.

John Waters - Role Models

Essays from American filmmaker, writer and artist pasy homage to mad genius

30 Nov 2010

Role Models (Beautiful Books) It’s been almost 30 years since outsider American filmmaker, writer and artist John Waters’ remarkable autobiography Shock Value cemented his perverse worldview and artistic transgressions with an all too rare honesty.

Alex Marsh - Sex & Bowls & Rock & Roll

5 Jul 2010

(The Friday Project) Pooterish internet celebrity Alex Marsh (privatesecretdiary.com) features the adultescent concerns of that modern publishing anomaly, the hobbyist’s memoir (yeah, thanks Mr Hornby), in this book about rock’n’roll dreams being…

Paul Rennie - Modern British Posters

14 May 2010

(Black Dog Publishing) As its title hints, with allusions to the gallery and the auction house, Paul Rennie’s intellectually rigorous, aesthetically pleasing book deals with a very specific type of art in Britain from the mid-20th century. Rennie’s…

Joe Sacco - Gaza Stripped

9 Dec 2009

Gaza stripped; Six years in the making, graphic novelist and journalist Joe Sacco’s latest book is arguably his masterpiece. Paul Dale talks to him about subjectivity

Film and DVD book round up

4 Nov 2009

Before he spawned America’s most famous Irish Catholic presidential dynasty Joseph P Kennedy was a Hollywood player. It could be said he was Hollywood’s prototype player. Between 1919 and 1928 he treated the burgeoning movie business like the gold mine…

David Small - Stitches

30 Oct 2009

(WW Norton) Award-winning writer and artist David Small draws a line from Kafka’s Gregor Samsa to the mundane confessionals of Harvey Pekar in this moving and poignant memoir of a childhood spent in the grip of illness. As a 14-year-old growing up in…

Film Book round up

25 Jun 2009

Former stand-up comedian Robert Sellers hops across the pond to detail wild and fast times of Hollywood’s original bad boys with Bad Boy Drive (Preface) ●●●. Following on from his previous opus Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard…

Film Books Round-Up

30 Apr 2009

Liberal, Jewish, prolific, daring and bald – there can be little doubt that theatre and film director Otto Preminger (pictured, above) was one of Austria’s greatest gifts to Hollywood. Literary consideration of Preminger’s oeuvre, which includes a…

Christopher McDougall - Born to Run

30 Apr 2009

SOCIAL TRAVELOGUE In 2001, former war correspondent and much-injured running nut Christopher McDougall asked his doctor why his foot hurt so badly. The medic, an expert in sports medicine, informed McDougall that at over six foot tall, his body was…

Film Books Roundup

19 Feb 2009

There’s something of a publishing boom in books about cinema at the moment. Whether anyone is actually going to buy these books is obviously a moot point, the current mantra of publishers and university presses is ‘publish and be damned, libraries will…

Will Eisner - The Best of The Spirit

8 Jan 2009

SUPERHERO With his domino mask, blue suit, red tie, blue fedora hat and gloves, Denny Colt aka The Spirit was what one newspaper in the 1940s referred to ‘the only real middle-class crimefighter’. Created in 1940 for a strip in a Sunday newspaper…

Film books round-Up

11 Dec 2008

‘Tis the season to settle down with a good old-fashioned film book. Having a stack of cinema related tomes on your bedside table is essential for any aspiring cineaste at this time of year. So after many hours of sifting through recent releases this is…

Jack Kilborn - Afraid

13 Nov 2008

Starting with a plane crash and ending with a coyote-on-human chow down, Afraid is a rattling good read for those who have the stomach for it. When a mutant military force turns up unannounced at the friendly law-abiding town of Safe Haven (population…

Boris Artzybasheff - As I See

13 Nov 2008

On a trajectory from the surreal to the satirical Russian-born New Yorker lies somewhere between Man Ray and Gerald Scarfe. First published in 1954, As I See is a collection of striking illustrations reflecting, among other things, the burgeoning…

Will Eisner - Textbooks

30 Oct 2008

Undoubtedly what editor Denis Kitchen calls the 'primary treatise on the theory and mechanics of modern comics', Eisner's influential textbook Comics and Sequential Art and its two companion guides get a makeover for the digital age. Honed from lectures…

Leah Hayes - Funeral of the Heart

19 Jun 2008

SHORT STORIES (Fantagraphics) Welcome to the weird world of Leah Hayes. Where an elderly couple digs mysterious tunnels at night. Where a young male kitchen hand becomes a duck-slaughtering expert when his girlfriend develops an unusual illness. Or…

Jason Lutes - Jar of Fools

22 May 2008

TRAGEDY/NOIR (Faber) First serialised in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger back in 1993, and anthologised in the US in 2003, Lutes’ remarkable graphic novel is long overdue a decent European release. Jar of Fools tells the story of…

Richard Cowdry & Various - The Bedsit Journal No 2

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…

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…

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis

10 Apr 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Vintage) In advance of the Persepolis feature-length animation to be released at cinemas at the end of this month (25 April if you want to note it in your diary) comes this welcome two-in-one paperback edition of Satrapi’s seminal…

Bill Griffith - Zippy: Walk A Mile in My Muu-Muu

13 Mar 2008

CULT STRIP (Fantagraphics) Having made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix in 1971 Zippy is getting old. For the uninitiated Zippy is a polymath, free associating pinhead who wanders the consumerist besieged wastelands of the US. Griffith’s…

Richard T Kelly

4 Jan 2008

Richard T Kelly is laughing at the jibe that his debut novel is a cross between Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. It’s a cutesy icebreaker and this editor and writer whose published works to date have…

The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

21 May 2007

CRIME SATIRE CF Wong is having a bad day. The office he shares with his Australian assistant Joyce is about to be demolished by property developers, and he also seems to be on a collision course with some vegan terrorists who have recently invaded…

Niall Griffiths

Runt

15 Feb 2007

What a courageous writer Niall Griffiths is. In the seven years since his debut Grits - an ambitious and occasionally brilliant study of modern hedonism in West Wales - he has divined, deviated and experimented with a bravery that is only really…

Winsor McCay

Editorial Works (Checker BPG)

12 Feb 2007

NEWS/REPORTAGE Better known for his groundbreaking 1930s animated film Gertie the Dinosaur (a film so exquisitely animated that it upped the game for Disney at the time), and comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend…

Harvey Pekar

Ego and Hubris (Ballantine Books)

12 Feb 2007

BIOGRAPHY/LIFE STORY Meet Michael Malice - childhood immigrant, dreamer, short-ass and egotist. In some ways he’s just another mildly schizophrenic man, raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, but to Pekar (the graphic novel’s greatest navel gazer) he is…

Niall Griffiths

Runt (Jonathan Cape)

29 Jan 2007

SOCIAL DRAMA What a courageous writer Niall Griffiths is. In the seven years since his debut Grits - an ambitious and occasionally brilliant study of modern hedonism in West Wales - he has divined, deviated and experimented with a bravery that is…

Elfriede Jelinek

Greed (Serpent’s Tail)

23 Nov 2006

SOCIAL DRAMA Like Austrian feminist writer Elfriede Jelinek’s novel The Piano Teacher, Greed has taken almost five years to be translated. This, however, probably has more to do with our penchant for feelgood celebrity literature than the contempt…

Comic - Will Eisner

Will Eisner

22 Nov 2006

COLLECTION The rediscovery of the mighty Will Eisner continues with this lovingly bound collection of more New York stories. Out of the four sections, there are actually only two graphic novels here - The Building and Invisible People. The former, is…

Jo Sacco

But I Like it (Fantagraphics)

26 Oct 2006

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/COLLECTION Containing some of the same material as previous Sacco collection Notes from a Defeatist, this new selection is a more focused attempt to archive and give order to the reams of material he amassed as a music mad young man who…

Joe Sacco

But I Like it (Fantagraphics)

10 Oct 2006

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/COLLECTION Containing some of the same material as previous Sacco collection Notes from a Defeatist, this new selection is a more focused attempt to archive and give order to the reams of material he amassed as a music mad young man who…

Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion (Bantam)

28 Sep 2006

Like a latter day John Thomas Scopes (the Tennessee biology teacher who was the inspiration for the play and film Inherit the Wind) Richard Dawkins has long been vocal about his belief that all children should be taught the Darwinian Theory of Evolution…

Alexander McCall Smith - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Some years ago Mma 'Precious' Ramotswe decided to use her inheritance from her beloved father to open a detective agency in Botswana. Having been met with scepticism by her bank manager ('Can women be detectives?'), she put together her assets (a tiny…