3:AM Magazine

The term “unconcept” captures the strange logic of the uncanny, as being “marked by the unconscious that does not know negation of contradiction … denying something at the same time conjures it up”. This duplicity inherent in the term mirrors the instability of the uncanny, as it slides between appearance and disappearance, coherence and incoherence. At all times, the uncanny is a concept that resists understanding and conceptualization. Above all, it announces a “nonthinking” whereupon “every successful conceptualization of the uncanny is doubled and also determined by failing conceptualizations”.

Dylan Trigg reviews Anneleen Masschelein‘s The Unconcept.

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The tone of Killing Daniel is a pavement shining with northern rain, late night in a totalising comfortable darkness where you become very conscious of your breathing and the texture of the back of your throat. There are a few moments of hope, and positivity – Fleur’s relationship with her grandmother, and her romantic encounter with a gentle off-duty cop – but they don’t detract from the pace, which is unremitting, and sepulchral. Apart from some of the habitual glitches that all writers commit (Yugi’s character is a bit stock anime villain for me, and you don’t need to italicise the names of fast food outlets and retail chains) the prose is fine and measured. The foulness of abuse, exploitation of women and children, resonates without hectoring. No misery-memoir descriptions are more frightening and damning that Fleur’s admission that her father simply watches her.

Max Dunbar reviews Sarah Dobbs‘ Killing Daniel.

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Anything completely made up feels inauthentic to Royle, he prefers to stick to reality as much as possible, experimenting with the made up and the not made up. ‘It is easy to imagine a character in a particular setting, if you’ve actually been there.’ In order to get an authentic feel for areas in Antwerp’s Red Light district, Falconplein and Verversrui in particular, Royle wandered around them with a hidden camera under his jacket, and the first edition of Antwerp has some of those images on the cover. In addition, exploring abandoned buildings for location and setting has been research that Royle follows for all his books. For him, such places are fertile grounds for possible stories, plots and characters.

Anushree Nande rereads Nicholas Royle‘s Antwerp.

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DFW’s constant grinding the bones of his stock is partly to secure a limbus of discoloration that will stain his language and make it fitting for the high design he has all the time and throughout everything, and to hold back for as long as possible just sheer unimaginable dread. In this, when reading these essays as with the novels, you feel how much at the threshold he held himself, constantly, so that reading is rather like feeling a red scar and guessing how beautiful the skin was prior to its injurous state, for which gratitude is his due, surely, alongside stupid brutal asides wishing just legato, no haul. But hey, writing’s not wallpaper.

Richard Marshall reviews David Foster Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not.

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That Crash came to dominate Ballard’s work to the degree it did isn’t a surprise. It’s the novel where all his ambitions – Surrealism, medicine, technology and personal anguish – collide with maximum impact. Given he spent so long trying to deflect moral objections to the book it was ironic that Playboy later declared it ‘the fifth sexiest novel of all time’, and that hindsight has confirmed it now ranks as one of Ballard’s most prophetic moments, anticipating the 21st Century’s fetish for both violent videogames and the rising body count of Hollywood movies. Indeed, when it comes to the future, Extreme Metaphors functions as a greatest hits package of Ballard’s predictions. It’s why Will Self notes, ‘other writers describe. Ballard anticipates’; in this area, Ballard was always a trailblazer. Twitter, YouTube, celebrity, Ronald Regan, the fictions of advertising, Second Life, the dead end of space travel – Ballard predicts them all well in advance of their realisation.

Richard Kovitch reviews Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G Ballard 1967–2008.

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In our culture, child sexuality is a taboo subject. While Durbin’s text certainly flirts with this taboo and evokes discomfort — when, for instance, a young girl drops her spoon while at the dinner table and bends to pick it up next to her father’s foot, “…she hesitates near the opening of her dress….a spoon in her cunt.” — the text never seems wanton; instead, I am reminded of the uncomfortable but calculated feelings evoked by Todd Solondz’s films Welcome to the Dollhouse or Happiness. I am reminded of Henry Darger’s paintings of the Vivian Girls. Unsettling, yes. Provocative, certainly. But also absolutely necessary, because without these moments of confrontation our limits go unexplored and perhaps more importantly unexamined. Just as Critchley suggests, “The disgust that we feel might not simply repulse or repel us. It might also wake us up.”

Christopher Higgs revisits Kate Durbin’s The Ravenous Audience.

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Sometimes a collection comes out and it isn’t so much just a collection of poems but an “intervention” too. Maybe you can’t put your hand on it but it throws something at something and changes the game a little. Like when they introduced Hawkeye in tennis and it didn’t just help you to see stuff more clearly, it also added a whole different torque to the sport. And it’s not really about the technology being used being that new or revolutionary or anything – I mean we knew balls were out when they were called in for ages – it’s more just like the relief and excitement of seeing it play out in the mainstream sport, new, tense and dramatic. And maybe it’s just me but that’s what Sam Riviere’s book 81 Austerities feels like – a really awesome and sort of game-changing intervention.

Colin Herd reviews Sam Riviere‘s 81 Austerities.

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What makes Mendelsohn’s choice to bring himself into the text in such a personal way so powerful is that not only does it serve to strengthen his argument but it reveals more of the man whose criticism we are reading. Criticism should not, as many people tend to argue, be about authority. It should be about trust, and today, with the proliferation of outlets allowing everyone an opportunity to voice exactly the way they feel about whatever it is they’ve watched or read or eaten in the past fifteen minutes, it’s never been more important to find a person whose opinion one can trust. Frankly, it’s Mendelsohn’s vulnerability (which may actually be the opposite of authoritative posturing) that creates the trust between him and his readers.

Alex Estes reviews Daniel Mendelsohn‘s Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture.

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I don’t know how the 30th anniversary of the novel was celebrated in Burgess’ country of birth – all I can remember is that 1992 was the year I read it for the first time. It was something I had never experienced before: the beauty of violence, the power of music, the questions of free will and state control, all brought up (in both senses of the word) by a delinquent hero you felt you should despise but couldn’t help liking. It was fascinating to watch the cogs of that orange grind: Alex and his droogs, starry vecks they beat up and devotchkas they raped, and all that horrorshow. Alas, none of the words which, together with some elements of cockney and Romany, make the book the bold linguistic experiment that it is, came as a novelty to me: they were given their native spelling and mixed with other, equally mundane ones, for the only version I could get my hands on back then, in the post-perestroika Moscow, was Russian. Another ten years later, when I finally picked up an English copy, I felt short-changed: it turned out that we, Your Humble Narrator and her droogies, had been robbed of all the inventions of the original.

Anna Aslanyan reviews the restored edition of Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange.

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What gets me is that people never seem to see the very obvious political considerations behind these things. Khomeini used the fatwa to rally weary Iranians after his disastrous war with Saddam. The Tories didn’t want to annoy the regime because at that time we still sent trade delegations there. Religious leaders in the UK used the fatwa to gain influence in public discourse, and to control their own communities. On the first anniversary of a book burning demo in Bradford, its Council of Mosque spokesman said, ‘We cannot let go of this issue. It is crucial to our future.’ The Innocence of Muslims film was distributed by hard right Salafi activists. The furore it caused pushed Assad’s war against Syrians off the front pages – not by coincidence, some Syrian dissidents will tell you. The culture war has to continue. Today a YouTube clip, tomorrow a blasphemous pineapple: all that matters is that the rage keeps flowing, and creates a general climate of low-key terror, what Rushdie calls a ‘footstep-haunted silence’.

Max Dunbar reviews Salman Rushdie‘s Joseph Anton.

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