
Reviews of the best new books appear in each issue of
The Edge
NON-FICTION
Paul Auster The Red Notebook (& fiction)
Collects pieces spanning several years and most strands of an active career; taken as a whole they make a stab at explaining a most complex character. Things that read like outlines for short stories, novels even; three book prefaces; and three interviews
JG Ballard Users Guide to the Millennium (also see fiction)
A collection of essays and reviews, from the sixties to the present (1996). Those New Worlds essays are included. Essential Ballard, then; file with Crash, High Rise, The Kindness of Women and a very few others
Roger Luckhurst The Angle Between Two Walls
Reading Ballard (only not very well)
Victor Bockris
With William Burroughs‘Private Conversations with a Modern Genius’. Burroughs interviewed, revised and reissued
Oliver Harris (ed.)
The Letters of William S Burroughs500 pages of them. Harris performs his task near flawlessly
Raymond Carver
Call If You Need MeThe recent Harvill Press collection including fiction & non-fiction, with previously unpublished material
Will Self
Junk Mail (& fiction)Self’s journalism collected
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crime and crime fiction
Gordon Burn
Happy Like Murderers (& fiction)Burn on the Wests. Not True Crime.
Ed Bunker
Mr Blue (& fiction)Autobiography
James Ellroy (& fiction)
An LA Crime Memoir; this book behaves like an act of contrition on Ellroy’s part
A collection of essays and stories originally commisioned by American GQ
Woody Haut
Neon NoirThe follow-up to the critically acclaimed Pulp Culture is a largely successful attempt to bring the story of American crime writing up-to-date
Nicholas Pileggi
CasinoLas Vegas and the mob; the basis of Scorsese’s film
Robert Sabbag
Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine TradeThe coke trade. A smart, fascinating and witty guidebook to the classier end of the chemical underground
James Sallis
Chester Himes (& fiction)A critical biography of "America’s central black writer" by the author of the Lew Griffin cycle
Prison Writing #11 (1997)
Short stories, poetry, book reviews by prisoners & interested parties. They've occasionally had interviews, including Ed Bunker and Martin Amis
Crime Writers in Conversation; a collection of interviews from Crime Time magazine, edited by Paul Duncan
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Paul Alexander
Death and DisasterThe death of Andy Warhol and the financial consequences
Joe Coleman
Cosmic RetributionThe art of Joe Coleman
Daniel Farson
Gilbert & George: A PortraitVery much a portrait, less than it is a biography, of Gilbert and George
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Nik Cohn
Yes We Have NoNik Cohn’s ventures into this vale of Albion find a country ill at ease with itself. Written in part for The Guardian and Sunday Times
Bill Drummond
45The terms of reference are wide. Drummond muses on nationalism and art; visits Serbia; records a soundtrack
Bad Wisdom (co-written by Mark Manning) with a host of fictitious Finnish punk bands; burns ‘a million quid’; drives round the M25; and tours London on Christmas Eve, distributing free Tennant’s Super to the homeless, including an amusing stint outside the Crisis shelter. Ferociously intelligemnt, sometimes poignant; strangeBrian Eno A Year With Swollen Appendices
Brian’s diary
Malcolm Hardee with John Fleming I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake
‘and other autobiographical confessions.’ Nominally the autobiography of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s harmonica player, who we might call the Godfather of alternative comedy
Steven Hawking
A Brief History of TimeGary Indiana
Let it BleedEssays 1985-1995. Mostly from the Village Voice; Gary Indiana is one of those who wakes by the dawn's early light in a state of perpetually enamoured disdain
Derek Jarman
ChromaSubtitled ‘A Book of Colour’, intended to be an antidote to the dry, academic texts on colour forced upon art students
Roger Wollen (Editor)
Derek Jarman: A PortraitLargely successful attempt to contextualise a genuine Renaissance man’s life. 151 illustrations archiving his painting; nine essays on various strands of his work
Derek Jarman & Howard Sooley
Derek Jarman’s GardenThe last book Jarman worked on. Jarman’s words occupy only a fraction of these 144 pages; the bulk are given over to photographs of the garden he fashioned from the rocky beach beside his fisherman’s cottage in Kent. A sea-tossed alchemy
Greil Marcus
The Dustbin of History"Cultural awakening comes not when one learns the contours of the master-narrative, but when one realises - thanks to a teacher, a book, or the disruptions of an unpredicted historical event - that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie." Pop prof Marcus on various subjects
Nicholas Negroponte
Being DigitalNegroponte’s collected and expanded columns for the techno-style bible Wired magazine
Laurence O’Toole
Pornocopia (review by David Alexander)
Pornocopia (review by Gerald Houghton)
The porn business; and New Labour, New Puritanism
Steven Shaviro Doom Patrols
A theoretical fiction about postmodernism
Iain Sinclair & Rachel Lichtenstein
Rodinsky’s RoomThe mystery of David Rodinsky and his room; the Jewish East End; Sinclair on London
Iain Sinclair
Lights Out for the TerritorySinclair on London, with Atkins
Iain Sinclair & Marc Atkins
Liquid CityPhoto-negative of Lights Out for the Territory; Atkins on London, with Sinclair. Fine photos
Iain Sinclair
Baby Doll (photos by Peter Whitehead, afterword by Sinclair)Sinclair on Whitehead’s photos
Iain Sinclair
Sorry MeniscusSinclair on the Millennium Dome
Peter Whitehead
Baby Doll (afterword by Iain Sinclair)You kill ghosts by photographing them, making them real... Peter Whitehead’s photographic exorcism. Worth your attention
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Norman G Finkelstein
The Holocaust Industry‘Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering’. Finkelstein, the son of holocaust survivors, launches an assault on the accepted orthodoxy of the Final Solution and the Zionist groups that would profit from its exploitation. Incendiar but persuasive.
Michael Medved
Hollywood vs AmericaSelf-appointed public moralist Medved wages war
Seamus Milne
The Enemy WithinMI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair. In the summer of 1984 Thatcher declared to a gathering of the faithful that following the Falklands they were to tackle "the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight, and more dangerous to liberty".
Haruki Murakami
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (& fiction)Mark Pendergrast
For God, Country and Coca-ColaWhen it comes to be written, the history of the 20th century will be viewed through its indigenous consumer culture, and seen not least through the distorting glass of the classic hobbleskirt Coca-Cola bottle.
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Michael Drosnin
The Bible CodeThe secret code in the Bible. "One can imagine smoke rising from Michael Drosnin’s lap-top after the People’s Princess ((c) T. Blair) so thrillingly pancaked into that Parisian tunnel wall." Trash trashed
Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval & John Grigsby
The Mars MysteryBig flying rocks might hit the Earth. They might have hit Mars already. Velikovsky-lite
Andrew Sinclair
The Discovery of the GrailA survey of Grail myths and legends through the ages
Colin Wilson
From Atlantis to the SphinxA Wilsonian exploration of ancient history
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film books now have their own section and contents page
music books now have their own section and contents page
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tv
see fiction for reviews of Charles L Grant's X-Files novels
Reading The X-Files; essays, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague & Marla Cartwright
Stuart Jeffries
Mrs Slocombe’s PussyA far more substantial text than you’re programmed for
Dennis Potter on himself; interviewed by Graham Fuller
The X-Files
, by Paul Cornell, Martin Day & Keith Topping