Lawrence Block is best known for the Matt Scudder novels and Burglar series, although these form a relatively small part of his output over the last fifty years. I used to have a triumvirate of favourite crime writers: him, Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard. The other two are gone now, which makes Larry the King of Crime, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve met a couple of times and correspond occasionally. Back in the day he did a guest blog on this site about one of his many pseudonyms (pseudonyms, and why writers use them, always interest me). He’s an accomplished, original short story writer, too, going back to before most of us were alive, when a writer could make serious money out of the…
‘City of Words’, I titled a recent article about Nottingham for The Author, but I’ve since discovered that, when it comes to UNESCO City of Literature status, Dublin coined this phrase some years ago! We’ve just been to the first conference for the Cities of Literature network, with seventeen of the twenty cities represented. This couldn’t have come at a better time for Nottingham, as we find our feet as a City of Literature and prepare to hire our first director (applications are open until June 13th). I’ll be reporting back to the board on a load of strategic areas and future possibilities when we meet this Thursday, but here are a few observations. For a start, there are signs or window stickers that use…
In June 2016, Shoestring Press publish ‘Provenance’, my new & collected short stories. There are eighteen, ranging from my first published piece, ‘Witchcraft’ (which appeared in Ambit in 1989) through to four previously unpublished stories (of which one – ‘The Way It Works’ – is a substantial, five-part story), written last year. The pieces cover the full range of my work, with subjects from music to middle-age and friendship to art fraud. I’m very proud of this work and I’d be delighted if you wanted to pre-order it a discount. (£10 post-free, as compared to £12.99). Furthermore, if you order by May 9th, you will have your name listed as a subscriber in the back of the book. The subscription idea, which helps decide the print…
Funny old week, including a 37 hour journey with a thirteen hour time difference, several hours in A & E (the two may be related: got great care from a junior doctor on the eve of the strike, but not one bed was available) and a visit from China by my old friend Martin Stannard, a poet and critic of some renown, but far less renown than he deserves. He’s one of the most original, interesting, influential and entertaining poets the UK has produced in the last thirty odd years. I’ve been reading his stuff since 1988 and got to know him not long afterwards, due to his connection with John Harvey‘s Slow Dancer press. John brought him here to read and I got him…
He knew, of course, throughout the writing and recording of this album, that it would be his last. So many songs about death, the afterlife, such generosity of spirit. I haven’t fallen for a Bowie album as heavily since Scary Monsters, 35 years ago. He made a handful of good albums after that, Outside and Heathen probably the best of them, but none as brave or consistent as this. I’m glad I had time to come to love Blackstar before it became so inexorably associated with his death. Bowie made his death a work of art, as his producer Tony Visconti pointed out earlier today, but none of us spotted it. Even the (now unbearably poignant) video for Lazarus was taken as related to the…