Blogs

Envy | Kathryn Chetkovich | Granta Magazine I came to read this in a roundabout way. A recommendation from a writer I hadn’t read. She’s posted on Betsy Lerner’s blog. I hadn’t heard of her either. Betsy was Lucy Grealy’s literary agent. I greatly admired her autobiography. Betsy’s literary agent to Patti Smith, whose recent publication Book of Days , which I haven’t read, obviously went straight in at number one in The New York Times Bestseller...

Betty by Tiffany McDaneil is my novel of the year. Yeh, I know it was published in 2020 and this is 2022, nearly 2023, but I’ve always been a bit behind. I’ll try and explain why I think it’s pretty much perfect. I had to check Betty wasn’t real. This wasn’t autobiography. Listen to the first line. It’s an encapsulation of the whole book. ‘A girl comes of age against the knife.’ A coming-of-age story, but we all know they are ten a penny. Who...

A very big thank you to everyone who came to our Christmas Zoom Reading. I think it was one of our best so far, with people joining in from all over the world. I do love our regular events in Soho, but at our online readings we get the chance to see and hear people who'd otherwise not be able to come. An especially big thank you to Mark Burrow and onemorething for organising so brilliantly (it's not easy!)

It’s the time of year when Top 10 lists tend to get published, so let’s start with a rundown of our best selling publications since our inauguration in 2018: 10 th : ‘My Brain In All Its Perfidious Beauty’, a compilation of entries from the 2020 Poetry Olympics competition which was won by Mark (Kilb50) Kilburn. 9 th : ‘Ghost And Found’ by Eleanor May Blackburn, who is a talented actress as well as poet. 8 th : ‘According To The Dandelions’ by...

Spoiler, I only watched about a half-hour of this. That old joke, it felt longer. Kate Winslet is an international star and has been a well-known face since she was in Titanic , 27 years ago, with that other guy (I wonder what happened to him?) Leonardo DiCaprio has refused to age. Seventeen-year-old Freya, played by Mia Threapleton, is Kate Winslet’s real daughter. In my day, your da got you a job in the shipyards. Kate got her daughter a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001fyzd/im-an-alcoholic-inside-recovery Alcoholics Anonymous is 75 years old. The first meeting was advertised in The Financial Times (other newspapers wouldn’t allow such advertisements) and held in The Dorchester Hotel in 1947. Around 5000 meetings take place every day in the South East of England. Deepfake technology allows some of these alcoholics to tell their stories. I’m already familiar with them. I...

Goodness these seem to come around very quickly. Still, no complaints here: some very good writing this week. Story of the Week In the prose department, I should name check monodemo’s Imagine , Charlie 77’s Behind 1 & 2, Mark Say’s Ghost Village and CSquirrel’s hilarious The Community Water Officer 1 & 2. However, I do have a particular fondness for Maddan’s sequence of monthly horror stories and so this week’s Story of the Week is his...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001fhl5/surge I watch lots of films. I guess it’s a way of turning off my mind. A passive acquiescence. But I found Surge , claustrophobic. The plots of most stories are quite simple. Make it hard for the protagonist. And I’m not going to go into that thing of there only being seven basic types. Joseph (Ben Whishaw of This is Going to Hurt ) has a shitty job. He works in security at a London airport. He...