real at last

Climbers makes it into the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide 100 Must-Read Books for Men.

nova nova

Nova Swing: advance copies of Bantam Spectra’s US mass market edition arrived this morning.
LP on living in the moddun world–
I’ve been wondering how concerned I ought to be that I am the only one among my friends who doesn’t know what a wii is – at least until last Sunday. Does this matter? They all [...]

stories

Listening to: Ry Cooder, Boomer’s Story. Reading The Atmosphere Railway, short stories by the immaculate Shena Mackay. Reviewing: The Silence Room, short stories by Sean O’Brien, from the increasingly interesting Comma Press. Wishing: that my own collection of stories was coming together a little more quickly.

an imaginary review (5)

This novelist’s characters are like himself. They speak in clever & rounded sentences. They have caught life in a linguistic net, & found some odd fish there, & now they are going to tell you about it: not really at length, but in the end at more length than you suspected in the beginning.
The impression [...]

dying on stage

Death wanders on to the stage dressed in a kind of dusty black romper suit with a not-very-good skeleton painted on the front of it, and begins to explain diffidently how this show differs from the one he’s used to.
The set, for instance, he says, is much reduced. There would normally be a row of [...]

horror needs victims

My review of Stephen King’s Just After Sunset, in the Guardian today.

the new rays

Or should that be El Rayo-X ? Anyway, a healthy “Yes!” to this, from Infinite Thought. The image is a touch of genius, & could have been improved only by having a link to David Lindley doing “The Tubercalucus & the Sinus Blues”. Maybe someone can find one, I can’t. Get well soon, IT. Or [...]

coa

Lara Pawson, restless as ever, now curates a Museum of Doubt.

you find ashes

This, from Ghost Light, is very shaming–
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it [...]

outsider

Between them, Maxim & his commenters make most of the basic points about Michael Crichton. I shall rather miss him. His fiction was as cheap as chips & he had none of the talent of a great popular writer like Martin Cruz Smith or Thomas Harris. But if nothing else he was a bete noir [...]