Bindlestiff

Image

Bindle stiff (noun): Hobo, especially: a person who carries their clothes or bedding in a bundle ~ Merriam Webster online dictionary

Bindlestiff is the first novel by Wayne Holloway, a director and screenwriter whose career has travelled from Channel 4’s Dogma TV at the start of the century to the docudrama Snake and Mongoose (2013). His debut novel is set in Hollywood in 2016, where a director is trying to get a film off the ground. The film is the futuristic Bindlestiff, touted as the story of “a black Charlie Chaplin” named Frank wandering a post-federal USA in 2036.

Bindlestiff the book is a satire. It mixes the bleakness of 21st century creative industries with climate disaster, the zombie lurch to the right orchestrated by the ones who will benefit the most from the civil war it will bring, the socio-economic and racial divisions embedded in US society, and the live streaming overwhelm of social media.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Fire Exit

Image

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty is a bildungsroman and a work of masculine realism. The narrator, Charles, recounts his teenage years growing up on a Penobscot reservation in Maine, intertwined with the story of his adult life as a single man shut out from the life he wanted for himself. He is not Penobscot himself, but grew up on the reservation with his mother because she had married a Native man after Charles’ father walked out on her. We learn that Charles was forced to leave the reservation when he reached adulthood, a year after the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Purity

Image

Purity is a collection of short stories by Andrzej Tichý, a Czech writer living in Sweden and writing in Swedish. In this collection, which has been translated into English by Nichola Smalley, Tichý explores the challenges of modern urban life in Swedish society through the lens of social realism.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Shalash the Iraqi

Image

Between October 2005 and November 2006, an anonymous writer posted stories to a website under the pseudonym Shalash the Iraqi. These stories documented the election process that, under the new Iraqi constitution, would replace the interim government installed in the aftermath of the second US invasion of Iraq and the end of Saddam Hussein’s control over the country. The stories were born from shock. They attempted to satirise the situation. They became an immediate hit locally, but the author remains anonymous because they also placed his life in danger.

In the introduction to this novel carved from the online stories, Kanan Makiya explains what kind of person Shalash is and what significance his stories held for the people in his community. He references the anarchy that followed the toppling of Saddam, the splintering of communities, the “total rupture with their past”.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

In Case of Loss

Image

In Case of Loss is a collection of essays by Lutz Seiler, a German writer best known as a poet. It contains the kind of writing that grabs me completely from the off and makes me wonder how some writers can do that while others take a while to warm up to, or show the mechanics of the writing process too clearly. Seiler, it feels to me, just writes. He won’t, of course. He will hone and craft and weigh each word, but the reader never knows it.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Two Quick Reads: Grounding and Physics for Cats

Image
Cover of Grounding, a poem by Laura M R Harrison, published by Awen Press
Image
Engraving by Helen Moss, image from the Awen Press website

I treated myself recently to Grounding, the first imprint from Awen Press, which is based in Creetown, Scotland. It’s a new press, set up by Helen Moss, an artist and engraver who is venturing into letterpress printing. The story behind Awen Press is on the home page of the website.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

Local Haunts

Image

Adam Scovell is a writer I discovered through my love of the books Influx Press publish. I bought his first novel, Mothlight, back in the Covid-19 pandemic as part of a subscription. His view of the world and its uneasy locations, the way in which their strangeness bleeds into the everyday, and the relationships people form with them over time, intrigued me.

Local Haunts collects together Scovell’s non-fiction essays written between 2012 and 2024. The focus is on place, but not from a geographer’s perspective. Scovell explores the cultural connections between place, people and creativity. He does this across literature, film, television and the psychogeography of wandering.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Her Body Among Animals

Image

Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals is a collection of short stories that examine women’s place in western society, the artificial limits placed on us because of our gender, and the impact of the type of toxic masculinity that draws heavily on a past where women had fewer rights. Science Fiction mingles with folklore, horror and pop culture to document the surreal and complex worlds of the characters.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Everything Will Swallow You

Image

In his third novel, Everything Will Swallow You, Tom Cox introduces us to the world of Eric and Carl, companions who live in a small cottage below a cliff and above the sea in Dorset. They have known each other for 21 years, their contrasting but complementary personalities the basis of an enduring friendship. Eric is a record dealer, among other things. Carl is, well, not even Carl is entirely sure what Carl is. Most people think he’s a dog of indeterminate breed, but Carl is much more than this.

Continue reading →
Posted on by Jan Hicks 2