Book Reviews Archive

I’ve been meaning to post something about Slightly Foxed for a while now, but something kept getting in the way. Since getting Various Authors off to the printers, I’ve had a little more time, and finally found the chance to open their Spring 2011 issue, no. 29.

Literary publications can approach their content in one of two ways: they can provide a range of essays, fiction, and poetry (Stinging Fly, The Paris Review, Granta etc.), or they can specialise, aiming to do one thing well. For The Fiction Desk’s anthology series, I decided to focus only on short stories. On the other hand, Slightly Foxed prints nothing but concise, personal essays about old books, both classics and forgotten gems.

Volume 29 contains 17 essays on titles as diverse as The Phantom Tollbooth and On The Origin of Species. They’re very well crafted, personal essays, of the sort that we encounter (and in my case, write) all too rarely on book blogs. The editors actually describe the content very well on their own website:

Slightly Foxed is more like a bookish friend, really, than a literary periodical. Companionable and unstuffy, each quarter it offers 96 pages of personal recommendations for books of lasting interest, old and new. It’s an eclectic mix, covering all the main categories of fiction and non-fiction, and our contributors are an eclectic bunch too. Some of them are names you’ll have heard of, some not, but they all write thoughtfully, elegantly and entertainingly.

The cumulative effect is that of visiting the best kind of used book shop, where you spend all day hanging around, talking to everybody that comes in and leaving with an armful of books. In fact, the publishers of Slightly Foxed do also have a bookshop, Foxed Books. I was in there once, a long time before I’d read the quarterly, and liked it very much.

The books themselves are beautifully produced, with very nice paper used throughout: the feel of each edition is more than enough to justify the relatively high price tag (a four-volume subscription costs £36). As you can see from the picture above, they also put a great deal of care and thought into the packaging.

As well as the quarterly, there’s a series of attractive limited edition reprints of lost or forgotten works, known as Slightly Foxed Editions.

All in all, Slightly Foxed is a must-read for literature lovers. Try it at least once, or you’ll never know what you’re missing out on.

Regular readers of this blog might remember my review of Sabra Zoo, Mischa Hiller‘s excellent debut novel based around the 1982 massacre in Sabra Camp. I concluded that review by saying how much I was looking forward to Hiller’s next book.

Well, his next book is here now, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Shake Off is set in 1989 and is narrated by Michel, a young PLO agent living undercover in London as a student. Sabra rears its head here, too: Michel is both a victim and a creation of that event, which claimed the lives of his family and led to his adoption by a PLO operative who arranged his education and later his training in espionage. Now he lives alone in a bedsit, addicted to painkillers and shunning human contact. His life, from what he does to how he lives, has essentially become a complex coping mechanism for his past. The enforced solitude and paranoia of his work create a noise that blocks out the past from his days in the same way the codeine gets him through the nights:

So you have to be on continual alert: every public place is a potential meeting place; every alley or public toilet could be a dead-letter drop; every street, store and restaurant needs to be assessed for its counter-surveillance potential. You need to be constantly on the look-out for places to cache money and documents. Everyday objects must be considered potential concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off.

But while Michel is good at what he does—and we get plenty of insights into the tricks of his trade—he is still an unwitting pawn, and the comparison that kept coming to mind was Alfred Hitchcock. Michel is very much a Hitchcock innocent, drawn into a murky underworld that he shouldn’t have anything to do with—even if that drawing-in has taken place years before the story is set. The story too has a Hitchcockian feel to it: the tense but witty set-pieces involving counter-espionage in Foyle’s on the Charing Cross Road, or the move from the London of the opening chapters to a climax set in the wilds of Scotland. The novel as a whole feels like one of Hitchcock’s better films, and I doubt that the cinematic appeal of the book is entirely coincidental. Hiller certainly knows his cinema—his screenplay for Sabra Zoo won the European Independent Film Festival script competition.

That said, it doesn’t do this book justice to simply praise it as a cinematic book, or an embryonic movie. The writing is strong and confident, even when the narrator is not: Michel and his world are vividly evoked. Hiller is, I think, an excellent writer. Sabra Zoo went down well, and Shake Off is getting positive reviews absolutely everywhere. Well-written enough to please the serious reader, and fast-paced and engaging enough for the beach (if summer ever comes), Shake Off deserves to do very well.

US-based independent Madras Press publish small books, containing one or more short stories, and donate the proceeds to charities nominated by their authors. The books themselves are very nicely done, attractive little square paperbacks. The first titles were released just before Christmas in 2009, and over the recent holidays they published their second series, which includes a new story from Andrew Kaufman.

Andrew Kaufman is a McSweeney’s contributor, and has two novels published in the UK by Telegram: All My Friends are Superheroes and The Waterproof Bible. He has a whimsical style, perhaps reminiscent of somebody like a Richard Brautigan, which probably works better in small doses like this than it does in his more extended work. Maybe for that reason, I enjoyed The Tiny Wife more than anything else of his that I’ve read. It begins with a bank robbery, in which the thief takes one item of sentimental value from everybody present. As a result of these losses, (more…)

I don’t usually cover nonfiction here on the site, unless there’s a strong connection to the world of storytelling. Titanic Thompson: the Man Who Bet on Everything both is and isn’t an exception to that rule.

Titanic Thompson, born Alvin Thomas, grew up in the early years of the last century, and became known as one of the greatest confidence tricksters of the era. He made millions of dollars through elaborate cons, and by hustling pool, poker and golf.

The path he cut through twentieth century America also brought him into contact with some of the period’s most famous and notorious characters: he was in on the poker game that led to the death of Arnold Rothstein, and he tricked $500 out of Al Capone over a bet regarding how far he could throw a lemon. He became the basis for the character of Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. He also found time to get married five times, and to kill five people. (more…)

As I immerse myself ever more deeply in the world of the short story, I’m discovering a near endless range of great publishers and publishing projects. As well as magazines and anthologies, I’ve seen some terrific chapbooks. I’m hoping to cover a wide selection of these over the coming months, but let’s start with Nightjar Press.

Nightjar Press is run by Nicholas Royle, himself author of half a dozen books and editor of several anthologies – including Best British Short Stories, a new upcoming annual anthology from Salt. They publish dark, disquieting stories, each of which examines general themes through a paranormal lens: a chill for now, a thought for later. (more…)

Gerard Woodward started out as a poet, and his prose career began a decade ago with a well received trilogy – August, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, and A Curious Earth. I managed to watch those books go by without actually picking any of them up; the publication of Nourishment, his new standalone novel, seemed like a good opportunity to start catching up.

Nourishment opens in the early days of the Second World War, in the London household of Tory Pace. Everything has changed with the advent of war: her husband Donald has been called up, the children have been packed off to the countryside, and her mother has come to live with her, ‘possessed of an unshakeable belief that her daughter, and London generally, needed her.’

Before long, the mother has set the tone of the novel by bringing home a piece of mystery meat from the remains of a bombed-out butcher’s shop – possibly a pork joint, probably a chunk of the bombed-out butcher. Then Tory receives a letter from Donald, who has become a prisoner of war. The letter contains scraps of general news, and an urgent request for dirty letters from his wife: ‘I mean really filthy, full of all the dirtiest words and deeds you can think of… Love to your ma, Donald.’ (more…)

A few months ago, I asked Twitter users to recommend their favourite literary magazines. The response was pretty impressive, and not least from the magazines themselves, many of whom are active on Twitter. I wound up with a list of a good dozen publications to explore, and first among these was Dublin-based The Stinging Fly, a triannual publication of new writing: poems, fiction, essays, reviews.

As well as the magazine, there’s The Stinging Fly Press, which publishes novels and anthologies. Among other titles, they’ve published Kevin Barry’s There are Little Kingdoms, and Fighting Tuesdays, a collection of stories by fourth year students from Larkin Community College.

Their latest publication is Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories edited by Philip Ó Ceallaigh. (more…)

People seem to be waking up to the fact that too much time spent browsing the web can damage our ability to concentrate on a single subject for extended periods.

Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, has been raising questions about the way Internet use (at work as well as at home) may be rewiring our brains, while over in the Guardian, Charlie Brooker wrote a piece entitled Google Instant is Trying to Kill Me, in which he discussed the ways that evolving technology has been chipping away at his attention span. He also tries something called The Pomodoro Technique, a special system whereby, through the use of a kitchen timer, we can train our minds to concentrate on a single subject for up to 25 minutes at a time!

What better time, then, to pick up the latest title from Peirene Press, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman. Oh, it’s short, like all Peirene’s books. It’s just 125 pages, which should present no challenge to even the most hyperlink-addled brain. Just 125 pages. Just a single, 125 page sentence. (more…)

You probably think that we survived the Millennium Bug. Perhaps you’ve even stopped nervously looking at the VCR’s clock when it starts blinking 00:00, you no longer think twice before booking flights over New Year’s Eve, or wonder whether there really are computer chips inside milk cartons.

Well, maybe you’re right. But step into the world of Things We Didn’t See Coming, the debut novel by Steven Amsterdam, and you’ll wish we’d all stuck with the abacus.

The nine or so chapters (which fill just under 200 pages), follow a single, unnamed narrator over roughly thirty post-apocalyptic years, taking him from childhood, just before the catastrophe, to an accelerated old age. (more…)

Last year, my review of Charles Lambert‘s debut novel Little Monsters included a hypothetical conversation with the author over a plate of pasta. A few months later, we had exactly that. The conversation resulted in a lengthy and (I hope) very interesting interview, in which we discussed the strange political situation in Rome, and Lambert also went into great detail about his new novel, Any Human Face.

In a sense, then, I’ve scuppered myself, because it’s difficult for me to write a review that would be half as interesting as Lambert was that day. So if you’re interested in finding out more about the background to Any Human Face, I’d suggest that you start with the Charles Lambert interview. (more…)

Telegram, the literary fiction imprint from Middle-East non-fiction specialists Saqi books, is an imprint that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now. Their list looks interesting, and their titles—All My Friends are Superheroes, Metropole, etc—seem to get quite a bit of attention.

I first heard of them last year on Twitter (where I am @thefictiondesk, and they are @Saqibooks), at a time when they were justifiably pleased with themselves for having won the 2009 Diversity in Literature Award, and by the beginning of 2010, I even managed to have one of their catalogues in hand—I got all the way to page 3 before finding something I wanted to read. (more…)

I’ve written about Bitter Lemon Press before, when I reviewed Saskia Noort’s Back to the Coast. They’re a solid niche press, publishing crime fiction, most of it translated, in paperback editions.

Involuntary Witness, which they’ve just republished with a new cover (see left) is the debut novel from one of their lead authors, the Italian one-time anti-mafia prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio.

The protagonist, in this novel and its sequels, is Guido Guerrieri, a defence lawyer who lives and works in Bari, a coastal town in the Italian region of Puglia (the area usually referred to as “the heel of the boot”). At the beginning of the novel, we find Guido in a bad state: still reeling from the end of his marriage, which has left him unable to concentrate at work and suffering from claustrophobia. When you add the development of a flirtation between Guido and his upstairs neighbour Margherita; and his latest case, involving an African streetseller accused of child murder, you get a pretty good idea of the formula that Carofiglio is working with. (more…)

I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to bother with doorstep novels, and when Roberto Bolaño’s much-lauded 2666 was published in English a year or so ago – all nine hundred pages of it – I decided that I didn’t have the time or the will to read it. Still, I was curious to see what kind of a writer lay behind the hype of 2666, and the recent UK publication of Nazi Literature in the Americas, one of Bolaño’s earlier, shorter works, has given me the chance. (more…)

I’ve always had a problem with over-the-top book design. From “interesting” binding styles to “witty” notes on the copyright page, whenever I see postmodern trickery on a book, I begin to worry that it’s trying to make up for a lack of anything more substantial. A generation of media studies students have demonstrated that postmodernism is art for the untalented, creativity for the uncreative.

I’ll probably never love McSweeney’s.

However, there are times – rare though they may be – when an eccentricity of design is simply the extension of a genuine creative process, rather than a substitute for it. If I was talking about architecture or technology, I’d say something about the form following the function and then we could all talk about Apple (or we could have, until they introduced those eye-burning glossy screens). This is a website about books, though, so I must be talking about A. C. Tillyer’s An A-Z of Possible Worlds, the latest publication from the relatively new Roast Books. (more…)

So here it is, then. The biggest and most controversial publication event in literature since the reissue of A Moveable Feast four months ago.

That last disturbance in the force was caused by Seán Hemingway, retooling a book that was already a posthumous retool of a manuscript left by his grandfather. The Original of Laura is a generation closer: here is Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir, presenting his father’s unfinished manuscript, which he has the sense to do verbatim—in facsimile, no less.

Having left the text itself alone, Dmitri Nabokov contributes an introduction, in which he discusses the history of the manuscript (written during his father’s final years, when his health was failing). It’s a strange introduction, drawing parallels that aren’t quite parallels: he points out that Nabokov had tried to destroy drafts before, including a draft of Lolita, but then, those weren’t published as drafts. (more…)

Petrograd:

…standing suddenly alone and exposed in an open space, he watched a horseman gallop up, point a pistol in his face, and demand, ‘For or against the people?’

‘I am English,’ replied Ransome, helplessly.

‘Long live the English!’ shouted the horseman, and galloped away.

I’ve always thought that the Swallows and Amazons books of Arthur Ransome, with their multiple layers of imaginative reality and potent sense of independence, are particularly fine training material for readers. And I’ve assumed – as one does, about the things one likes – that his appeal was more or less universal, but his books do seem to have a peculiarly British appeal: they’re not available in Italy, for example, and even the more literary, nautically minded Americans I’ve mentioned him to haven’t heard of him.

Perhaps this primarily British appeal explains the title of Roland Chambers’ new biography of Arthur Ransome, The Last Englishman. It’s a bit of an off-the-peg title, catchy but not particularly fitting, evoking an anachronistic quixotism that might have been more appropriate for Russell Miller’s Conan Doyle biography. (more…)

It can be interesting to watch the subtleties of marketing change between different editions of the same book. From covers to titles to apparent target audience, dramatic changes take place as books move across oceans. David Vann‘s Legend of a Suicide is a good example: in the US, it’s a collection of short stories built around a central novella; in its UK edition, published by Penguin, it’s a novel. Neither description is inaccurate. (more…)

Many of the books that have crossed my desk lately have involved some kind of attempt to combine didactic fact with fiction: not just historical fiction, but books with a real desire to offload information onto the reader. Maybe “edutainment” based on real-life events or people makes for easy marketing, or maybe authors just aren’t active enough, and must find the truth of their adventures in history books rather than their own lives. War on the Margins, Libby Cone’s debut novel about the Jewish experience of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, takes its own approach to the challenge. It’s successful in some ways but less so in others. (more…)

Do we have a canon of contemporary European literature? It’s hard to imagine so, because no two European countries can draw on exactly the same sources. The view of the canon from France might include a Spanish novel that has been translated into French but not English. The Germans might be all over a Danish novel that the rest of us will never see. I might put the best of Zoran Zivkovic’s work forwards for inclusion, but this would make no sense to readers in Italy, who have yet to receive any of it in Italian.

Even where the potential for translation grants has been thoroughly exhausted, our national views of European literature are separated by cultural differences; different things matter to different races. This means that any nation’s view is refracted through not one but two separate prisms, angling certain rays into oblivion and focussing others more sharply. For a writer to claim a place in any European canon, there needs to be enough universality in his themes to angle his light directly. (more…)

When exactly did horror fiction become unacceptable? Is there a year, perhaps, a specific date after which anything supernatural becomes the exclusive possession of the recluse, something to occupy spotty teenage boys until they discover spotty teenage girls?

I think we’re all agreed that Frankenstein and Dracula are allowed on any bookshelf. Likewise, nobody would bat an eye if they spotted the spine of an M.R. James or the ghost stories of Charles Dickens; these snuck into the mainstream through a door that somebody left open at Christmas. H.P. Lovecraft is permissible for the sake of nostalgia, and Poe, well, he wrote poems and stories set in France, so he must be okay. Shirley Jackson’s a woman, so what she writes can’t really count as horror, and anyway, she’s a Penguin classic. Horror novels aren’t published by Penguin Classics: they’re printed by suspicious-sounding paperback imprints you’ve never heard of, they’re written by people with names like Hank Buckweather; they have titles like The Rats from the Pits of the Blood Demon and covers that feature skulls with a serpent coiling out of one eye socket and a scorpion scuttling out of the other. There will also certainly be blood… (more…)