Dial M for sci-fi
Ed Champion reviews Iain M Banks: In an Iain M. Banks novel, you will find sour antiheroes sweet-talking corpulent cannibal kings, erratic robot drones so caught up in lending a helping hand that they overlook the telltale traces of emotional breakdown within those they serve, and a febrile zeal for blowing things up which suggests […]
The wonderful art of Satchmo
Ahead of Steven Brower‘s Satchmo: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, due 2009, the Paris Review editors share some of Satchmo’s collages: When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became […]
How to live
Paradise Row, in association with the How to Live blog, are launching The Speakers’ Society, a forum for the exploration of ideas in the realms of contemporary art, culture and politics. At their first event philosopher Simon Critchley will “take the opportunity to refute the old Ciceronian wisdom that to philosophise is to learn how […]
Les D écal és
In September’s Dazed & Confused, Andrew Gallix on the French Offbeats: In one of his early stories, the French advertising executive turned writer Fr éd éric Beigbeder imagined Saint-Germain-des-Pr és — the ultra-posh heartland of Parisian publishing — overrun by hordes of vandals from the deprived banlieues. It ends with the pope of French letters, […]