Whatever it is, we're against it.
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The Valley of Kings, 1922. Obstinate and impatient, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon descended with their excavation crew into darkness. “If they go down in that spirit, I give them six weeks to live,” joked reporter Arthur Weigall. Carter—the self-made man, the scrappy adventurer—broke into the outer chamber, which released a plaintive gust. He clambered inside, the first soul in three thousand…
Being a regular guy — that is, being downtrodden by the capitalist system as opposed to merely heterosexual and (possibly) patriarchal too — Hugh spent the best part of Christmas Eve alone at the Space, inputting the last lot of scientific data (which was not data science, or even rocket science, but still just as boring). At eight PM he was finally ready to log-off and head back through the dark…
No one knows why anyone else is here. The Swiss consul, for starters, is searching for his ex-daughter. The country, he says, is remote; others say that eventually, her mien spectral, she may well return. Some give instructions: For proper aftercare, boil your ear in salt water for fifteen minutes, twice a day. If excess itching occurs, drown a gibbous. If you are struck by the need to vomit, or…
At the outset, a taxi accidentally exits a car park through the entrance, thereby producing a remainder — “a surplus piece of paper” — in the shape of a ticket that preserves its potentiality by remaining in abeyance: “the unsurrendered ticket, paper scrap that had purloined itself, slipped through the architecture of the system it was meant to serve”. There are other similar intervals —…
My ‘novel’, The Coast of Everything , was published on June 16th (Bloomsday, cheekily enough) and in fairly short order had accumulated a number of lengthy reviews in prominent places that exhibited a conspicuously uniform hostility and (the author would suggest) misunderstanding. It was almost as if a memo had gone around — indeed, one reviewer explicitly suggests that one at least should have.…
‘You must choose’, Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel Molloy , ‘between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done.’ For Beckett as a young author, James Joyce was the writer of ‘everything’ whose intoxicating maximalism compelled him to go in a direction that eventually led to the sequence of novels which began with…
Bowie’s life and work was an act of supreme creativity but also one of ‘decreation’. His approach throughout his career was to adopt personas that provided spaces for his listeners to reflect on their situation and create for themselves a more authentic life. His songwriting was an act of self-effacement, an attempt to get himself out of the way, but he then killed off these many ‘selves’ and,…
When I became a ghost, I kept going but the world went slack. The living drifted like continents. Sneezes bloomed slower than the corpse flower at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which is where the blood clot got me. I quickly gave up on all that edification and headed south to Port St. Joe to see about killing my husband Swett. At first, I passed time floating through cars, tapping French fries out…
Things got sticky this week, Stephen told her, when the man he called the Russian went into the bathroom for private ablutions and the glass eye he took out to wash slipped through his fingers and rolled into the toilet stall. The first thing anyone heard was the unlockable bathroom door swinging open with unusual force. Then the surge of limbs pumping and a sense of their pluming wake as the…
It immediately immerses the reader in a world of magical realism, layered language and music. We meet Ravi, Sean, and Vikram, three childhood friends from South London whose shared history binds them through deep loyalty and strong, albeit typical male-friendship kind of affection. They flock together like birds of a feather, quite literally, because one of the curious secrets they share is that…
