This is a selective archive of reviews, features, and essays I’ve published in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, Esquire, Arena, etc. You can browse below in reverse-chronological order or read by category: general book reviews (e.g., DeLillo, Murakami, Mailer, Gibson, Saramago), heterogeneous essays, or reviews and other pieces on technology, language, music, or philosophy; and some interviews.

Having resolved to exercise your brain and refresh your literary palate you decide to read this newly translated 1968 text by the deceased experimental french writer georges perec who is celebrated for once having written a long novel without using the letter “e” so having forked over your ten quid for this short story or at a stretch novella but a book is not any the better for being cheaper by the word you remind yourself in any case having forked over ten pounds you begin to read and either you find the looping style immediately so rebarbative that you cast the book to the floor and feyly lament your wasted cash or you find the style intriguing and continue reading Continued →

What kind of sunglasses would James Bond wear today? Such is one of the important branding questions addressed by this literary reboot, which is “Copyright Ian Fleming Publications Limited”, though composed by a writer of serial-killer thrillers. Bond in 2011 still drives a Bentley, wears a Rolex, and waves a Walther, but his shades are hip and technical: he sports Oakleys.

This new Bond is “a man of serious face”, which probably does not mean that he has a really massive face and needs oversized Oakleys. Bond is in his thirties, a former Navy officer who saw frontline action in Afghanistan and was then recruited — not to MI6, but to a black-ops outfit called the “Overseas Development Group”. Bond is still run by M and furnished with gadgets by “Q Branch”. (Bond’s mobile phone, in an excitingly modern way, has lots of espionage “apps”.) Continued →

It is near to the end of days, shortly before the appearance of a “stupid Messiah”. Two British men, employed somehow in academia, muse on their lack of success and incapacity for real thought while drinking too much gin. “We are Brod and Brod, we agree, and neither of us is Kafka.” Sometimes they travel to a conference, and drink too much there instead. One of the friends insults the other with spectacular, relentless cruelty. The insultee also has to deal with a damp problem in his flat that gradually assumes apocalyptic proportions of sweating metaphor.

That is all that happens in Spurious. If Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet had just sat around bitching instead of investigating the world’s knowledge, the result would have resembled this novel. It is a tiny marvel of comically repetitive gloomery. Continued →

After more than a decade’s labour, Jonathon Green, lexicographer of the subversive, has produced as fine a three-volume dictionary of slang as you would desire to piss upon. (1700: “excellent, first-rate.”) Like the OED, it is built on “historical principles”, with dates for citations, one of whose effects is to impress upon us the boisterous demotic creativity of our forebears, who were no less interested than we are in making up new ways to describe getting drunk. (1650: “Go to the scriveners and learn to make indentures.”) Continued →

Is my review of a novel composed entirely of questions itself going to be composed entirely of questions? What do you think? What is this novel composed entirely of questions about? Is it “about” anything? How are we to imagine the scenario? Do certain lines and section-breaks in the novel, one coming after the question “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”, imply unheard answers by another character? If we assume the questioner is speaking his questions out loud, what are we to make of the moment when he says he was writing one? Is this interrogation taking place in a military base, or a padded cell, or in Purgatory? Who are the other people present who never speak either but are implied exactly once? Or is this all in the questioner’s head? And if so, how did we get inside his head? How can we get out? Continued →

Do you find it hard to concentrate these days? Do you get fidgety after two pages of a book, and look around for something else to do? Is the online abbreviation “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) your response to basically everything? If so, Nicholas Carr feels your pain, and has diagnosed the cause: using the internet has rewired your brain and turned you into a flibbertigibbet. Continued →