Books
The Skinny book guide – bringing you book reviews, features, events, reviews and author interviews. Find previews and on the ground reporting from festivals of literature and poetry in Scotland and beyond.
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Book ReviewsHeaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Heaven and Hell is set in Iceland around the start of the 20th Century, and it concerns a boy named Bardur, and a boy who goes unnamed. Both are taken as pas... Read more »| 06 Sep 2010 -
Festivals
David Crystal @ EIBF
David Crystal has written Begat about the King James Bible’s influence on English language as a birthday present to it, for its 400th year in p... Read more »| 04 Sep 2010 -
Book ReviewsWhat the Hell Are You Doing? by David Shrigley
The artist David Shrigley is from Macclesfield originally, but is now a Glasgow resident, and if you’re struggling to place the name, you’ll prob... Read more »| 02 Sep 2010 -
Features
A Sideways Ride Through Jekyll and Hyde
Kevin MacNeil is a writer from Lewis whose previous work has included poetry, plays, and a debut novel The Stornoway Way - which Rodge Glass named as his choice for ‘Best Scottish book of the 21st Century’ in our Unbound pullout. His latest book, A Method Actor’s Guide to Jekyll and Hyde, is out on 1 September Read more »| 02 Sep 2010 -
Book Reviews
Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel
Life of Pi deserved all the praise it got, but Yann Martel’s highly awaited follow-up Beatrice and Virgil isn’t as impressive. The ... Read more »| 01 Sep 2010 -
Festivals
Melvyn Bragg @ EIBF
What makes great art – where does it come from? Even with over 30 years of sharing popular and high art on The South Bank Show, Bragg conceded ... Read more »| 31 Aug 2010
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FestivalsRoddy Doyle @EIBF
A Star Called Henry, the first in a planned trilogy to be titled The Last Roundup was published in 1999, and was followed in 2004 by Oh, Play That Th... Read more »| 30 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
Simon Crump & Ewan Morrison @ EIBF
When the chair, Aly Barr, tells you that he has been given the ‘young bloke’ strand of events and you sit in a room disturbingly close to... Read more »| 29 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
John Simpson @ EIBF
Who among us wouldn’t covet John Simpson’s air miles? His destinations we might not relish quite so much. Just back from Afghanistan and ... Read more »| 29 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
Steve Bloomfield @ EIBF
Steve Bloomfield is the author of Africa United, a book subtitled ‘How Football Explains Africa’ and was a journalist in Africa from 2006... Read more »| 27 Aug 2010 -
FestivalsHanif Kureishi @ EIBF
Hanif Kureishi appeared in the largest tent, the RBS Tent, and drew a large crowd for this event, promoting his new volume of collected short stories... Read more »| 27 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
David Mitchell @ EIBF
I wasn’t prepared for quite how funny David Mitchell would be. Reading from his new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, to a packed cr... Read more »| 27 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
Jonathan Bate and Kathleen Jamie: Poetry and Landscape @ EIBF
The two writers here were each qualified to talk about poetry and landscape in a different way. The poet Kathleen Jamie is, of course, a very accompl... Read more »| 27 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
Alan Moore @ EIBF
Alan Moore was interviewed by the Guardian’s political cartoonist Steve Bell, who said that he’d interviewed the master of the graphic st... Read more »| 26 Aug 2010 -
Festivals
Seamus Heaney @ EIBF
Have you ever been spellbound? It was only when I emerged from the Book Festival tent after listening to Seamus Heaney read poems from his latest col... Read more »| 26 Aug 2010