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NEWS FROM NOWHERE
Radical & Community Bookshop
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Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
by Inga Muscio
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Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio (£8.99, Seal Press) is a little classic in the making. Muscio writes with irresistible verve and passion about how women can reclaim power, not least over their bodies and sex, from centuries of oppression, violence and marginalisation. Her straight-talking, optimistic writing is a mix of deeply personal reflections and brave visons and strategies for a different world - for example what if a community's response to a rape was not silence and shame but a mass demonstration? How would your outlook change if you spent a year listening, reading and viewing only books, art and films created by women?
Wall and Piece (£20, hardback, Century) collects the work of the radical graffiti artist known only as Banksy. Banksy's distinctive stencil art crops up in unexpected locations - under bridges, on derelict walls , on cows, on pavements. In his pictures, policemen kiss, rats abseil & crack safes, and each piece is a subtle, subversive joke.Whether it's giant trompe-l'oeil paintings of a beach paradise on Israel's partition wall, planting his own exhibits in the British Museum or the Tate, or sticking a wheel clamp on Boudicca's chariot, the audacity & imagination of his artistic stunts can't help but make you grin.
NEWS FROM NOWHERE
Established in 1974, News From Nowhere sells radical books & magazines, plus world music CDs, cards, postcards and more. Our books range from feminism, anarchism, socialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-war to fiction, children's books, health, wellbeing and spirituality. The bookshop is run on a not-for-profit basis by an all-women workers' co-operative.
ADDRESS: 96 Bold Street
Liverpool L1 4HY
TEL: 0151 708 7270
nfn@newsfromnowhere.org.uk
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On writer
Emma Brockes' bedside table
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This Real Night by Rebecca West
I’ve just ordered a load of Rebecca West books from Amazon. I hadn’t read her before, but I read her interview in the Paris Review interview book and I thought she was incredibly funny and caustic. She just slagged everybody off, including Virginia Woolf.
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Writer's Bookshelf
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∆ In which a prominent writer picks their favourite writing guidebook |
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Mary Loudon recommends
Life after Life by Tony Parker
(Out of print, available online)
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THE National Portrait Gallery is my favourite art gallery. I love the immediacy of the human portrait; what it reveals about its subject, but also what it does not. I am thrilled by the marriage of reality and the imagination, and I like what it requires you to fill in for yourself.
As a writer, I am excited by portraiture, by the revelation of individuals through detail and contrast. I am awed, also, by what is universal about real human experiences, and what is unique, so while I love fiction, I have no desire to write it. Personally, I find reality more interesting than anything I could dream up myself.
Halfway through writing my first book (Unveiled, life stories of ten nuns), my father gave me a copy of Tony Parker’s Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers. I was transfixed. Here was a writer who revealed individuals behind acts so horrifying that sympathy as a reader was compromised from the outset. This made for an inherent tension in the book, adding piquancy to stories that were more tragic than brutal, more terrifying in their ordinariness than their aberrance. Coleridge wrote: ‘No man is as good or as bad as he seems.’ Parker’s writing reflected that insight.
Tony Parker was an incredible writer for one, complex reason: he was both benevolent and dispassionate. He listened without prejudice to his subjects, and cared about them without resorting to sentiment or conjecture. He also understood that our downfalls, and redeeming features, lie in the details. However, while Parker produced forensic portraits of real people, he did so within narratives so beautifully crafted that they subtly elevated everything individual to the universal. In this way, he wrote with greater articulacy about the human condition than anyone I have read before or since.
MARY LOUDON is the author of four books. Her latest, the bestselling memoir, Relative Stranger: A Sister’s Life After Death, is published in paperback by Canongate at £7.99.
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| Mslexia review choices |
∆ In each issue of the magazine reviewers assess books across selected genres. These are the ones they liked best. |
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SHORT STORIES
reviewed by Alisa Cox
Open by Lisa Moore
Like Munro, Moore exploits the short story’s potential for capturing intense moments of personal experience, shifting between past and present. As the title suggests, readers looking for a simple beginning, middle and end, will be disappointed. In ‘Melody,’ memories of hitching with the narrator’s best friend, and her subsequent abortion gives way to fragmented passages from a love affair, much later in life, with a dentist. Only in the final pages is there a coming-together between the two strands. It comes as no surprise to read that Moore has an art school training; the stories are structured by patterns of imagery and often make explicit reference to the visual arts; ‘The Way the Light Is’ even switches between prose fiction and film script
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DEBUT NOVELS BY SHORT STORY AUTHORS
reviewed by Victoria Briggs
The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger
Taking as its backdrop Beijing in the 1990s and contemporary Los Angeles, Nell Freudenberger’s The Dissident is an ambitious, sprawling novel. It opens with Yuan Zhao, an infamous artist and political activist who is about to embark on a year-long teaching and cultural exchange trip to America. Preparing to play host to him is Cece Travers, a well-to-do LA wife and mom, whose family life is a dysfunctional blend of teenage angst and marital discord. Stepping into that mix are assorted in-laws and family friends, all in possession of a variety of peccadilloes and personal agendas.
Given the upheaval in the Travers’ household, it is unsurprising that anyone fails to notice how reticent the new house guest is when it comes to discussing his past – or his failure to deliver the kind of groundbreaking artwork with which he is well known.
Freudenberger’s story-telling gifts are considerable, as is her talent for cultural observation. Yuan observes the escapades of the Travers family as only an outsider can, while engaging with themes of authorship, things that are ‘not art,’ and fighting the feelings he has for June Wang, his most talented student. ‘I was not free from consequences,’ says Yuan, ‘simply because I was in a foreign country.’
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GRAPHIC NOVEL
reviewed by Daneet Steffens
Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi
Satrapi’s compelling graphic memoir, Persepolis, revealed her childhood in exile from and return to Iran in the 70s, 80s and 90s; in Chicken With Plums, she reaches back to 1958 Tehran to tell her great-uncle’s story. A celebrated musician, Nasser Ali Khan is bereft at the loss of his beloved tar, a traditional stringed instrument. He hunts for a new one, his journey coinciding with post-coup Iran’s loss of confidence and search for happiness. A slim volume, full of dark, shadowy figures of family flashbacks and incipient terrors, Plums is a vehicle that allows Satrapi to delve into her culture’s legends, as well as a fable of hearts broken by betrayal.
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| Independent press spotlight |
∆ DEDALUS BOOKS – grew out of a writers’ group in 1983, surviving near bankruptcy, hostile publicity and relatively small UK sales figures to become one of our most distinct independent publishersReview by Rosie Jackson.
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Alice the Sausage by Sophie Jabès
When her father makes a cruel comment, Alice is driven to over-eat, over-seduce, then literally be eaten by men. A rather masochistic fable to my mind, but then fantasy writing has always had licence to resist political correctness.
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