The purpose of all wars
The book partly originated from my own travels and realising I was a war tour voyeur while inter-railing around Europe and beyond. On the one hand, when people visit places there is an authentic desire to understand and find out about history and there is also a problem if past horror is erased and people choose to forget, as has happened in our cultural memories of colonialism. But these acts of looking are part of a holiday and visiting other places, of fun and entertainment, so it was this tension between the two that spurred me to write the book. After a while there was a sense that it’s impossible to escape from war zones and the remnants of war, so in ‘With Their Backs to the Fort’ the couple find war memorials even on an idyllic quiet island.
Kerry Ryan interviews Zoe Lambert.
Stanley – Animals with Amazing Disguises
This is Stanley’s first album and obviously these guys have been listening heavily to Neil Hannon’s The Divine Comedy. As far as as overwhelming influences go, they could have chosen worse (disclosure: we’re big fans of Hannon). Inevitably one is tempted to compare them to the original, so to speak, and Stanley have nothing to […]
3:AM Cult Hero: Miquel BauçÃ
In her introduction to The Siege in the Room translator Martha Tennent writes: “Critics placed his work in the line of European experimental writers such as Robert Walser, Dino Buzzati, and Franz Kafka (though he could equally have been compared to Thomas Bernhard for his unapologetically obsessive vitriol)..” So why haven’t we heard of Catalan […]