With nine Academy Award nominations, tying with Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel for the biggest number of nominations this year, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman sets expectations high. Transcending planes of fiction, Birdman is, at outset, a film about a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver novel, during which the director, writer and lead actor Read More
The Theory of Everything is a compelling film, adapted from Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Wilde Hawking. The intimate workings behind Stephen Hawking’s genius are glossed over, in this instance focusing instead upon his personal life. It is an evocative portrayal of Hawking’s struggles with MND (Motor Neuron Disease), offering a Read More
Beta Life is a collection of science fiction short stories, tied together by the thread of artificial life (A-life). From body-altering nanotechnology to the future of immersive games, Beta Life explores the imaginations of over a dozen writers and scientists, each with their own unique take on the future. The opening story, Martyn Bedford’s “The Read More
“An Eschatological Bestiary admits to different foci. Recording descriptions of natural history and popular accounts of climate change and inequality, its faunal composition offers symbolic visions, modern protest, and a complete exegetical interpretation of the dramatic rise of an apparently semi-permanent moral blank.” The above is an excerpt from the introduction, which explains what Hardwick Read More
In this sentimental musical journey back into wartime Dundee and dark family secrets, the themes of loneliness and loss are never far away. Barbara Burnett (played by Sue Robertson) sits on a bench at the top of the Law in 1965, and looks back across a quarter of a century at the city and her Read More
Approaching his death in 1782, the “Father of Military Medicine” Sir John Pringle deposited his papers in the library of the Royal College of Physicians, taking legal measures to prevent their contents being published. After two centuries and multiple attempts, these restrictions finally been set aside, providing the basis for Morrice McCrae’s biography of the Read More
I was born in the city named after Odysseus and I praise no nation – to the rhythm of snow an immigrant’s clumsy phrases fall into speech. Ilya Kaminsky is an immigrant but in this his first full collection his phrasing is anything but clumsy. Born in Odessa, his family was granted US asylum in Read More
Henry Shukman’s Archangel, published just under two years ago, was much anticipated; it was his first collection since the publication of his award-winning debut In Doctor No’s Garden, over a decade ago. The central sequence of this work addresses a captivating piece of little-known history: the story of thousands of Jewish immigrants, tailors, to be Read More
Granta 2012 Poet and visual artist Sean Borodale’s debut collection, Bee Journal rightly earned him an Eliot prize shortlisting and a Guardian Book of the Year accolade. What he terms “poem work” involves making verse in situ – smoked at the opened hive, or note-sticky at the honeyed centrifuge. If most poems may be considered Read More