Nige recommends the short fiction of A.E. Coppard - a writer who deserves a revival... I recently mentioned A.E. Coppard, a writer whose name was unknown to me when I came across it - and seems to be generally forgotten, though a book of selected stories, Weep Not My Wanton, was issued only ... Read More...
Fiction
Frank busts some of the myths surrounding Lothar Preen's storied Four Last Songs... Tra La La, The Drainage Ditch is one of the Four Last Songs by elegantly-bouffanted sociopath Lothar Preen [above]. It is, for the majority of critics, the best of the quartet, a brain-numbing racket of melodic astringency with ... Read More...
The Travellers' Library series of books published by Jonathan Cape gives a fascinating glimpse of literary fashion in the 1920s, including names that have endured, others that have been completely forgotten, and still others currently halfway to obscurity... My edition of James Joyce's Dubliners was published in Jonathan Cape's series The Travellers' Library ... Read More...
The true story behind the famous poem by Robert Browning... Good evening. My name is Guus. If I may, I will tell you an anecdote. I am an ancient and somewhat crumbling gent, and it might be thought that I would have a veritable storehouse of anecdotage to draw upon, but ... Read More...
What's the real minority specialist-interest genre of books - the one that bookshops just can't shift? It's literary fiction, says Steerforth... As a bookseller, one of the first lessons I learned when running the fiction section was that the sales of the first volume of Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps ... Read More...
Frank reveals the story behind The Heft of Dough, the notorious concept album made by the power pop combo Agnetha and Anna-Frid and Benny and Bjorn and Dot Tint... The Heft Of Dough is the title of an LP recorded towards the end of the last century by Agnetha and Anna-Frid ... Read More...
Professor Nick Groom explains the English tradition of the Christmas Eve ghost story... The nights are long and dark, the wind is bitter chill, the leafless trees are rimed with ice: winter has arrived with a sudden ferocity. What better than to lock the doors, curl up beside a log fire, ... Read More...
In this story, extracted from Frank's new book The Funny Mountain, an 18th century Baron's ha-ha wall plays an important role in intergalactic warfare... Writers of science fiction are fond of the invisible force-field, an unseen barrier which unexpectedly stops a spaceman, or the evil Thargon, in his tracks. Landscape gardeners ... Read More...
It has long been believed that Ernest Shackleton's glimpses of an 'extra man' on his Antarctic expedition were exhausted hallucinations. But Frank has discovered important new evidence showing that he may have been right all along... Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you ... Read More...
Frank went to see the exhibition Terror And Wonder : The Gothic Imagination at the British Library. On his way home, he fell into a hypnagogic trance. When he awoke, he found he had scribbled the following story in his pocketbook... One foul and thunderous day, Prince Fulgencio was much pained ... Read More...
