Over the last couple of decades, Scottish crime novels have become immensely popular and increasingly in demand. The genre is going strong thanks to pioneering authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, and now Denzil Meyrick wishes to join that list. This latest novel in a series by Meyrick, The Last Witness is a Read More
The cover of Sheenagh Pugh’s new collection features a photo of the long shadows of two people, standing on a beach, apparently looking back on their own footsteps. Backdropped by a close-up of round, eroded stones in a blue-grey scale, that opening image accurately reflects the title – Short Days, Long Shadows. Focused on the Read More
Ian Duhig has been, to use Lawrence Sterne’s own phrase, “Shandying about” in Yorkshire for Digressions, his collaboration with artist-printmaker, Philippa Troutman. In 2013, the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth, they set out from Shandy Hall, Coxwold in North Yorkshire where The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was written, to celebrate Sterne’s great work through Read More
J. Michael Shell’s The Apprentice Journals follows the story of Spaul, one of the few remaining Apprentices in a post- apocalyptic America, an individual with the ability to speak to the strange elemental beings that now run rampant across the Earth. Spaul crosses paths with another Apprentice, a mute woman named Pearl, who merges with Read More
“It’s your call.” So responds a radio command at the end of American Sniper’s introductory salvo. Immediately, this gives the audience an insight into the life of the sniper: deciding who lives, and who dies. As the sound of Chris Kyle’s (Bradley Cooper) rifle shot fills the cinema, an immaculate piece of editing transports the Read More
Big Eyes is Tim Burton’s attempt at “ordinary”, but thankfully he still succeeds in injecting the film with the usual zest of kitsch and quirk that make his films so recognisable. The comedy-drama biopic follows Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) and her exploitative husband Walter (Christoph Waltz), who fraudulently assumed credit for her life’s work: paintings Read More
Born in 1968 in Broughty Ferry, Hazel Frew is now Glasgow-based. She has published in various magazines, including Orbis, The Rialto, Poetry Scotland, Fras and New Writing Scotland. Minim is her second poetry selection to be published by the Rack Press, the first being Clockwork Scorpion in 2007. Her first full-length collection, Seahorses, was published Read More
…because he has no highfalutin song to sing, no neat message for the nation. (“Goalkeeper with Cigarette”, 1995) To open up this Simon Armitage retrospective is to delve into a treasure trove of the surreal, the unlikely, the ironic, the laugh-out-loud comic, the darkly humorous and the downright horrific. Above all, it is a delightfully Read More
Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer was born in 1901 in Czernowitz to German-speaking Jewish parents. Having studied literature and philosophy at the city’s university, she emigrated to the US in 1921 with Ignaz Ausländer, her future husband. Although she was divorced from Ausländer after only three years of marriage, she is still best known as Rose Ausländer. Read More
Reliquiæ is an annual little magazine of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art.Volume Two’s deep-green cover asks the reader to connect the book with “A tree, a rock, an embedded boulder, a ruin, a body, a hand, a passage” before opening it. These are not clearly linked objects: you can enter a ruin, Read More