Deviance :: Books :: Review 06 Nov 2008
Nine: "Part memoir, part pop-culture study, part feminist theory," enthuses the blurb on the back of the book. Maybe that’s the problem: Look Both Ways tries to do too many things at once. On one hand, it’s the story of the author’s bisexua...
Books :: Review 03 Nov 2008
Ryan Agee: Verne Rand is a born climber, a man so at ease on tricky ascents that it’s as if he’s part of the mountains. He’s the fascinating (fictional) character at the heart of Solo Faces, a book written in the third person but focusing more o...
Books :: Review 28 Oct 2008
Dennis J. Murphy: Neil Gaiman, in addition to being the award winning graphic novelist who wrote the Sandman series amongst other things, and the award winning writer of print novels like American Gods, also writes kids books. And they’re good too. Sickening isn&r...
Books :: Review 22 Oct 2008
Keir Hind: David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film is pretty essential for any serious film buff. Yet this is the first time that Thomson has produced the obvious companion, a series of essays on individual films. And, as expected, it's highly opinionated...
David Agnew: Spider follows three characters, Andy, Deanna, and of course Spider, with sections told by each. They're teenagers, who go joyriding, and the book is about the consequences of that activity. The three of them are pretty one-dimensional though - Spider ...
Books :: Review 07 Oct 2008
Keir Hind: Philip Roth’s latest book seems to return to themes in his first, Goodbye Columbus. Columbus dealt with the problems society’s restrictions caused a young man in late 50s America, and Indignation deals, broadly, with the same theme in early...
David Agnew: Wire fans, this is where it all began. David Simon, who (if you don’t know) is the creator of The Wire, was once a journalist for the Baltimore Sun. He was a crime reporter for years before taking a leave of absence to follow the Baltimore police...
Books :: Review 30 Sep 2008
Renee Rowland: The Gargoyle is a contemporary gothic love story, made like a mosaic from pieces of fairytales and love stories from the ages. An epic debut by Andrew Davidson, the story is related by a nameless narrator who, prior to being burnt beyond recognition in...
Books :: Review 29 Sep 2008
Robert Walker: Ansel Adams was a legendary photographer. He mainly shot landscapes, specifically large-scale American landscapes, and his photographs are often breathtaking. This book collects a number of the photographs he took of America’s national parks &nda...
Books :: Review 22 Aug 2008
Erin McElhinney: If the Book Festival ever became fatiguing due to its surplus of talented egos crammed into one concentrated space, Dave McKean would be the perfect antidote. Quietly self-effacing, painfully modest, and obviously more happy as an observer than a perfo...
Books :: Review 13 Aug 2008
Hannah Brooks-Motl: The devil and all his works have always been fodder for fiction, and now Justin Evans has added George Davies to the playgrounds of the possessed. We meet Davies as a new father seeking help for a peculiar problem: he’s afraid to touch his son. C...
Books :: Review 11 Aug 2008
Rob Wringham: Haruki Murakami's style is deliberate, economical and has a unique 'sufficiency' which lends itself startlingly well to magical realism. His style somehow succeeds in making everyday non-adventures – say, cooking spaghetti - into engaging portrai...
Books :: Review 07 Aug 2008
Katie Gordon: On a dark and stormy night the disreputable Dawson sisters stumble across the dying body of Patrick Davidson, the apothecary’s apprentice. Unwilling to be implicated in his demise, the sisters drag the body to the School House in the hope that th...
Books :: Review 06 Aug 2008
Rebecca Isherwood: This impressive collection of wicked, fantastical fairy-tales has already garnered much praise; at the age of 24, when the book was first published in hardback, author Karen Russell was included in the New York magazine’s “25 under 25 to Wa...
Books :: Review 17 Jul 2008
Ryan Agee: Elephantina is a cross between a historical novel and a comic one. Drummond invents the journals of one Gilbert Orum, assistant to the very real Dr Patrick Blair, who was the first man in Britain to dissect an Elephant. The book is Orum’s account...
Books :: Review 09 Jul 2008
Keir Hind: Rachel Fox sets out her stall early in this delightful new poetry collection: “There’s nothing sacred about poetic form / You can get bored of imagery” she writes, “Worry less about the cleverness/ Worry more about the song&rdqu...
Books :: Review 22 May 2008
Nine: Everybody knows it’s not cool to be a Queen fan. Mike Dawson knows this, and he’s written a whole book about it. Specifically, an autobiographical graphic novel explaining how his lifelong obsession with Queen has tied in with his formative...
Renée Rowland: A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a ‘factional’ story based around the mysterious 1988 crash of a Hercules, which carried General Zia, Pakistani dictator of 11 years, and the American Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, to their deaths. Des...
Books :: Review 15 May 2008
Rebecca Isherwood: Creator of the concept of ‘Dangerous Writing’, Tom Spanbauer utilises a brand of literary minimalism, focusing on heavy topics such as race and sexual identity and paying very close attention to language. Never more has this approach been c...
Books :: Review 25 Apr 2008
Rebecca Isherwood: The birth of Bad Traffic came in response to the real life crimes concerning the deaths of dozens of illegal Chinese immigrants in a lorry container, and the drowning of the cockle pickers on Morecambe Bay. Author Simon Lewis spent a great deal of time...
