Writing a new realism
Fiction is everywhere, from four minute pop songs to films; I like the idea that my words can show the conversation they are having not just with the literary tradition they’re coming from, but also the many other forms too : visual art, film, music and indeed, other less glamorous things, environmental science, history, engineering. Maybe my next book will be illustrated with the designs of oil rigs. Or the social history of the German train network… I’m just talking about realism here: The Readymades is a realist novel, realist fiction changes with the age, many novelists today fail to realise this and write books like Dickens or Balzac, or even worse, Evelyn Waugh.
John Holten interviewed about his debut novel The Readymades by Karl Whitney.
Unsecured By Landscape
The stories in New Cross-Fucked Musings… exist less in some disputed demilitarized zone between fact and fiction than the much more interesting hinterland between fact, drunken fabrications, sideshow myths, misspent childhood reminiscence, fantastical speculations, psychological imbalances and outright lies. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story and good stories these largely are. They’re nonfiction in the sense your dreams and nightmares are nonfiction, made up of fragments and contortions of actual experiences and emotions. Not so much the cracked looking glass approach as the hall of mirrors… Truth isn’t the point here. The story and it’s telling are everything.
Darran Anderson reviews the Tom Bradley-edited New Cross-Fucked Musings on a Manic Reality.