Reviews on The Review

I first visited Hebden Bridge 20 years ago, and was captivated by its gothic remoteness and Victorian charm.  Its plethora of book, record and junk shops didn’t hurt either, and I’ve been drawn back to the town every year or two since.  If it hadn’t been so distant from jobs, family and friends I would [...]

This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce [...]

If there’s some bad news for art lovers who haven’t been to London recently, it’s that there’s less than a month left to see the Arshile Gorky retrospective at Tate Modern. The good news is that there are seven weeks left to see its partner exhbition, Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde.
 
The Gorky exhibition is [...]

Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel.  Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef.  He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that [...]

The late, great Sun Ra operated his jazz Arkestra through much of the seventies and eighties until his ultimate and untimely return to the Saturn of his ‘birth’. Ra (aka Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount) was renowned as an iron disciplinarian who inspired either devotion or scepticism amongst the players in his band.  In the early 1950s, [...]

With the summer blockbuster season still some way off, it’s possible that there may yet be a worse film released this year, but they’re going to have to try particularly hard to sink to lower depths than Perrier’s Bounty.
 
Set in contemporary Dublin, this shockingly clichéd film follows Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) through 48 hours that [...]

After the sprawling trawl through Glaswegian boyhood that was Keiron Smith, Boy, James Kelman returns to the short form with a new collection of stories, If it is your life. As ever with Kelman, the writing is sharp, blackly funny and masterfully aware of rhythm. But it also gives the reader a clear impression that [...]