Well we have some fantastic picks for you this week! Our story of the week is an ABC debut, from new author TFH. ‘The Late Bus’ is a sophisticated and psychologically charged story about a middle-aged autistic man taking his aging mother on a trip to Lancaster. When she dies he is unable to feel any emotion – and the work that results is a fascinated window into a different kind of mind. An outstanding debut and the first, I hope of many: http...

Kate Millett wrote The Loony Bin Trip at the rue de Seine between 1982 and 1985. She questioned whether ‘they were right after all. My own mind was too dangerous.’ They are the medical establishment, the pharmaceutical companies, the police, the government, all the outsiders. But what makes it tragic was the collusion of all the insiders too. She follows in the path of R.D Laing Madness comes from the family and Thomas Szasz, madness is...

Exciting news this week, as another ABCtales member publishes her work! Christine Hamill's 'B is for Breast Cancer' is now out with Hachette - have a look, like the page, share it with your friends and buy a copy: https://www.hachette.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780349401348 Christine's promised to share her story in a special guest blog that won't be long in coming - so watch this space for more about her work. But for now I'll turn to picks...

Away from Her (2006) on BBC iPlayer, written and directed by Sarah Polley, based on the short story by Alice Munro ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’. As a writing exercise we were once asked to think about adapting a short story into a potential script. I chose a little known Turgnev story as a jumping off point. You could say if it was a currant bun it still had half of a currant in it. Polley keeps most of the currants and most of the bun. She...

Brooklyn’s Finest are, of course, all cops. When I see a film like this I always thing of The Wire, multiple storylines, flawed human, no discernible difference between cops, drug dealers or robbers. They’re all just trying to get by, flawed human beings, making mistakes. I don’t know if thats’ like The Wire , cause I’ve never seen The Wire , only read about it. In the opening shots, for example, the camera tracks through a car window. Sal(...

The picture on the cover of this book is a beautiful young girl, a cygnet, before becoming a swan. Below the author’s name, a gushing endorsement from the Sunday Times : ‘The year’s most talked about novel...extraordinary’. The ordinariness of the extraordinary has become something difficult to live down. Here we have a sixteen-year old adolescent with leukaemia. She knows she is dying and there is nothing anyone can do about it, but in a way...

February's off to a sharp start. Flooding and tube strikes, gloomy weather and the controversial opening of the Winter Olympics in Russia, not to mention the death of the incredible Philip Seymour Hoffman. And some of it must be inspiring, as this has been one of the hardest weeks to make a pick of the week in a long long time. Please, for your own benefit, have a look at the cherry-page and make your way through some of the incredible poems and...

Putin’s Russia welcomes athletes and spectators to the Sochi Winter Olympics. According to news reports they haven’t enough snow and have to use machines to create the necessary runways and conditions for it to go ahead, making it the most expensive Olympics ever. There will be no protests in Putin’s Russia, as there are in Brazil for that great media bauble called the World Cup. The notion of perestroika and glasnost are from a different...

This the second of three programmes was entitled ‘The War Machine’. All wars, of course, are fought in the name of peace and it would be far better if it were left to machines. This is a great mock-up of 1966 and it’s all over now, but it was a close run thing. Paxman, for example, interviewed two retired trade-unionists in Ferguson’s shipyard in Glasgow. They were old, but they weren’t that old as to have been on strike for higher pay and...

This past Saturday ABCtales took The Black Swan in York by storm. It was a night to remember: we had a huge turnout and a suite of incredible readings that ran the gamut from daff-picking to Italian cooking, African vacations to dopplegangers, social workers to microwave ovens. The stories and poems were stunning, punctuated by a ukulele serenade from Miss Jacqui Wicks and a digital cameo from HudsonMoon - who made an appearance all the way from...