Red Plenty Book Review
While the “Russia” shelves of American bookstores groan under the weight of heavy tomes on the horrors of Stalin and the Gulag, the relatively liberal period that followed has
One-Armed Gunslingers and Germans in Teepees: A Brief Guide to the Euro-Western
The Western is the quintessentially American genre. However played out it might seem at times, it offers an incredibly versatile context for near-mythic narratives about good and e
Review: Sandcastle and Robot
The other day I was watching a Channel 4 news segment about the now ubiquitous “occupy” facemasks, in which they dragged around the aged hippy & magician Alan Moore, introd
The Secret Afterlife of Roy Orbison
Had he lived, Roy Orbison would have been 75 this year. Here, Daniel Kalder writes about the Big O’s transcendental power… For me, like most people, memory is intricately inter
Explaining Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis
The private papers documenting his cosmic illumination by a pink laser have long gilded the PKD legend. Published at last, do they shed much light for the rest of us? Philip K Dick
Mr Blair Goes to Kazakhstan
Ah, Tony Blair—you can’t keep a good hustler down. One minute he’s singing the praises of formaldehyde at the opening of a methanol power plant in Azerbaijan (£90,000 for a
Storytelling is a Deadly Business: Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Letter Killers’ Club”
Anyone who has ever strolled into a Barnes & Noble and felt a certain despair at the sight of all those books lying on tables and shelves, many of them not very good, all of th
Happy New Apocalypse!
With apocalypse fever receiving a boost from all those alleged Mayan prophecies surrounding 2012, Daniel Kalder undertakes a brief survey of the history of Catholics and the End Ti
Boris Akunin Interview
Grigory Chkhartishvili, AKA Boris Akunin, is an international publishing phenomenon. A scholar of Japanese language and culture, and a former literary translator, he wrote his firs
The Wild World of Vladimir Sorokin
At the London Book Fair earlier this month, Russia was featured as Guest of Honor. Nearly every Russian writer of distinction was in attendance, save for one: Vladimir Sorokin