The book is short and sharply structured. It moves quickly and makes its points neatly. It is inescapably cold in some respects but the reader will come from it with an unforgettable experience. It is a pleasure to see a writer of such gifts – albeit sometimes uneven performance – produce a work of this quality.
A review of Birnbaum by Michael Hoffman
The twists of narrative are skillful and Hoffman sustains the interest of the reader right to the end. The conversations are real and Hoffman peoples his novel with convincing characters. He is an expert in what critics once described in the novels of Aldous Huxley as “cold agonies”.
Adrian Thaws, alias Tricky, Delivers Complexity You Can Dance To: Knowle West Boy
The dynamic, fun, imaginative, and thus far well-received album Knowle West Boy features the genre-bending collaborations of Tricky with members of his own boutique label Brown Punk. Tricky is great at presenting complexity, including personal and social contradictions, for which he has found a musical language, mixing very different sounds.
A review of The Write Advice – Inspirations, Observations and Affirmations from Classic and Contemporary Writers by Michael Meanwell
The Write Advice is an interesting collection of affirmations and sayings that you can enjoy whenever you need a little inspiration, to get yourself going, or just for a laugh. This is a neatly presented, well chosen group of sayings that can prove valuable for both changing your mindset, and finding camaraderie and support from the most lofty sources.
A review of The Steele Diaries by Wendy James
The novel is easy to read and moves quickly, effortlessly creating that fictive dream that makes for a pleasurable reading experience, but this is anything but a lighthearted read. The complexities of parenting, the shifting trends of the art world, the struggle to balance self-actualisation and artistic fulfilment with responsibility and love, the way we create and define ourselves, and the relationship between the interior world and the exterior one are all covered with great subtlety and depth.
A review of Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die by Howard Waldman
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review The Man Who made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review of Dirty Money by Richard Stark
Stark as a crime writer is beyond criticism. He does pretty much everything well. The way he writes dialogue, especially scenes where three or more people are talking, is well worthy of study. His art as a storyteller is to create problematical situations, uncertainties, iffy anxious stuff – and then to resolve them in a felicitous manner.
Beyond Category: Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple and St. Elsewhere; and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On
Thomas Callaway’s voice, in which I hear traces of Sam Cooke and Al Green, is not the kind one would expect to be heard and appreciated in a culture in which so much excessive and false masculinity is celebrated; and yet it has been heard—and it resonates in the hearts of many: androgynous, clear, dramatic, soulful.
A review of Qmin by Anil Ashokan
Ashokan has come up with some nice options that are still Indian, but light, and so nicely presented, that you could serve them to the Queen. Most don’t take hours and hours of reducing either, which is another problem I’ve encountered with Indian desserts. The Kulfi has been drastically simplified by using condensed milk, and when served with figs and walnuts, it’s really lovely.