What I read
Finished I Pose - I wonder if this might be classified as absurdist fiction, though this seems to be a somewhat later category? It's certainly somewhat surreal. Also, certain cringe-making attitudes, alas.
Latest episode of Tremontaine.
KJ Charles, The Price of Meat (2016) - alt-Victoriana queer horror novella, riffing off various ( Read more... )

Have been devouring my way through two Joolz Denby novels which I only recently found out about: The Curious Mystery Of Miss Lydia Larkin And The Widow Marvell and Wild Thing - the latter I learnt about via a short notice in last week's Guardian Review, the other by going to the website of Ignite Books when Amazon didn't seem to have copies of Wild ( Read more... )

I do not think it is just wounded amour propre to be negative about an article which happens to fail to cite Mi Amayzin Contribushionz to historiography of particular subject at particular period, when no-one else's relevant work published in the area since c. 1996 (of which there has been quite a bit) is cited either.

Just sayin'. FAIL.

***

Eye- ( Read more... )

I already posted some preliminary impressions of Valerie Lawson's Mary Poppins, She Wrote, a biography of P L Travers. If you are thinking of reading this, don't bother. Quite apart from the string of tangential inaccuracies, and the maddening style, there seems to be a complete mismatch between author and subject going on. While I can quite see ( Read more... )

Kathryn Hughes assesses the lives of two 19th-century pioneers:
While the approach of Elizabeth Blackwell and Jane Franklin to getting what they wanted could not have been more different, their starting points were strikingly similar. Both were born into the English middle class (Franklin in 1791, Blackwell in 1821) and both fitted awkwardly into ( Read more... )

The Fat Duck, the pioneering British restaurant that introduced the world to delicacies such as sardine on toast sorbet and bacon and egg ice cream, has been declared the world's best place to eat.

See also: Matthew Fort on the rise and rise of Heston Blumenthal, the science of food and The Fat Duck.

And from yesterday, Joolz Denby on Orange Prize ( Read more... )

Just read, and strongly recommended (though not perhaps for anyone feeling depressed and fragile, as it is fairly grim and gritty stuff), Joolz Denby's Billie Morgan, about an ex-biker chick living in Bradford and running a jewellery and gift shop and concealing a dark secret. This summary completely fails to convey the quality of Denby's writing ( Read more... )