A line from Nick Sweeney’s new novel Laikonik Express reads: Kennedy recalled the Baltic beach scene from Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum, shit-stirrer Oskar and his mom watching a longshoreman fish off a shore a lot like the one he looked on now. “Shit-stirrer Oskar,” but when you are so small maybe that’s all you can amount…
Posted on 16th July 2012
Posted on 29th May 2012
Nothing Doing
It is not the Sword of Damocles that hangs over the boy/man/writer of these tall stories (it would be fatuous and easy to call them short): it is the atom bomb. The boy/man/writer in this off-kilter Bildungsroman looks up and sees not the looming atom bomb, but a huge juicy nipple. This is what the…
Posted on 6th November 2011
Fiction Uncovered by…David Rose, writer
On a trip to one of my favourite small bookshops recently, my attention was drawn to a small display of books from a new, local publisher I had not heard of. As I like to support publishing initiative, I decided to buy one of the titles (I had actually already spent that week’s book allowance)….