It’s the first time I’ve been to the Imperial War Museum since I was 11 and I’m a bit disorientated, so I ask a member of staff where the Once ...
It’s official: Amazon now sells more e-books in the US than it does paperbacks. The gradual disappearance of the physical book could be the long-awaited solution to that old problem: ...
I bought a new diary today. One of my New Year’s resolutions, probably like thousands of other people across the country, was to get into the discipline of writing a ...
Money and sport go together. In the last few weeks, as the credibility of cricket wobbled under allegations of corruption and match-fixing , I’ve been reading the funny and satirically ...
This month’s Litro has a bit of an East London thread running through it, which is appropriate for me, as I’ve been trudging the streets of the East End looking ...
There are some words that are worth keeping, I’ve always thought. Everyone has their favourites – my friend Neil always swears by cornucopia. Defenestration seems to come up quite regularly. ...
I’ve been haunted by whales this week. It all started with Dave from my writing group trying to list songs about whales, which spawned an eclectic playlist. Then ...
Last week I squeezed into a packed and sweaty auditorium at the South Bank Centre to watch performance poet and punk legend John Cooper Clarke’s show for the London Literature ...
It might be a sign of the digital times, or an indicator of economic gloom, but working in a secondhand bookshop can be slow. We have many ...
A film still from Lord of the Flies (1963)
Gangs. It’s a great theme. Hasn’t everyone been in a gang at some point? We obsess about gangs as kids—starting them, desperate to ...
The Hugo Awards have been running for over fifty years and remain the best known literary award for science fiction writing. The nominees for this year were ...
In the first of a series of plugs for my favourite short stories, this week I’m enthusing about Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Axe”. Managing to be funny and genuinely creepy all ...
It’s not often I’ve heard an audience at a fiction event let out a collective gasp of horror. It’s a thrilling sound, and last week it reinvigorated my passion for ...
My short story diet this week has been An Elegy for Easterly, the debut collection by Petina Gappah, published last year and winner of the Guardian First Book Award. The ...