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...

A collection of short stories that won the Man Booker International Prize, which is a surprise, because nobody publishes short stories now, but if you’re Alice Munro you can pretty well do what you like. A good story—whether it’s short or long—makes you think of other stories, perhaps something that happened in childhood. Bad stories are easy to spot. There are no bumps or mounds among the words, no mountains of childhood and you might just as...

Tomorrow is ABCtales’ get-together in the North – we’ll be meeting at The Black Swan in York from 18:30 – and it promises to be an incredible time. If you haven’t planned your Saturday yet, book a ticket, borrow a car, get your nan to give you a lift: do what you need to do to be there! Among the readers will be VeraClark, whose ‘Tissue Atlas’ is our Story of the Week. This piece is a remarkable biography told in the style of a human atlas. The...

Watching or reading about the Holocaust, or the horrors of the Japanese prison camps, always makes me hungry. I don’t know if that makes me empathetic or a greedy bastard. I suspect in another life I’d have made quite a good Nazi. I’ve read about Terezin before. It was a half-way house to the hell of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. In buildings that should have held a maximum of 6000 the camp held, in 1942, 60 000 and they kept coming,...