“Landslides of words, empty wells and a wasteland await”. This one line from Yannis Kondos’s Absurd Athlete perhaps best describes the collection as a whole. “Landslides of words” suggests the intense power and emotional force harnessed in these pages while “empty wells” conjures images of starkness and emptiness, a recurrent theme in Absurd Athlete. The Read More
Written by the winner of the Dundee International Book Prize in 2000, Andrew Murray Scott’s third novel The Mushroom Club certainly bolsters his reputation of having a somewhat unusual approach to writing. The narrative is one of the ultimate mid-life crisis, centring around three friends from university, Emerson, Quinn and Edwards, who meet once a Read More
Do you still look under your bed, checking to see if the monsters are asleep? Does the wardrobe give you a sense of foreboding, harbouring, as it must all manner of things that go bump in the night? Perhaps they all come from the woods outside your home. Canadian writer and artist Emily Carroll is Read More
Self-Portraits by David Pollard is a meticulously crafted collection of poems inspired by the work of eighty-nine artists. Each piece is assembled in such a way that the reader can visualise both the artists and the portraits which inspired the writing with clarity. From Caravaggio to Goya, Da Vinci to Warhol, the poet covers a Read More
Terence Winch’s latest collection, Lit from Below, is not for the faint-hearted. In ninety ten-line sonnets, he weaves together elements of what at first read like dreams and whimsy, before going off at a tangent into even more surreal imagery. Just as you think you might be able to make some sense of it, he’ll Read More
Tiffany Murray has been a Hay Festival International Writing Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and her academic posts have included Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of South Wales. Her previous novels Diamond Star Halo and Happy Accidents were shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the London Book Award. Diamond Star Halo Read More
Two years ago, I read and loved Ismail Kadare’s 1970 work The Siege, a historical novel centred on 15th century Ottoman attacks on the Albanian city of Skhodër. Kadare is Albania’s foremost living author and, in rendering the episode, he absorbed me completely. Before reading The Siege, I knew nothing about the conflict to which Read More
The main danger with a collection that only contains 16 relatively short poems is that they all need to be excellent or at the very least good. Even four mediocre or bad poems might ruin the entire pamphlet since they constitute one fourth thereof. This is not to say that one cannot make any mistakes Read More
Ancillary Justice won almost every major Science Fiction award last year, and it is easy to see why. The novel is a space opera, set across various parts of a well-established galactic empire, and starring a main character who is all that remains of a star-ship’s artificial intelligence. The very idea of attempting to write Read More
It is difficult to know what to make of Rhys Hughes’ absurd collection of short stories or flash fictions as he calls them. Stories collected in The Lunar Tickle are very short, often lasting only a couple of pages. They vary significantly in quality, with some being quite memorable and others not at all. Although Read More