China City Stories: an interview with Ra Page
Despite its rise China remains an enigma for many in the West. As fiction can provide a way to get under a culture’s skin—the short story doing so in immediate and concentrated
Meet The Toughest Clerics Who Ever Lived
Daniel Kalder says that St Ignatius set a high standard when a cannonball tore open his leg Early Christian practice emphasised asceticism and poverty, but the idea of radical wi
When Writers Censor Themselves
The suppression of literature is an ancient tradition that probably started with the invention of writing and which thrives today all over the world. In the west we generally vener
PP Appreciation: Ex-Marvel Man, Pariah, Blogger Jim Shooter
Is the best blog in publishing written by a 60 year-old former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics? I think so. Though he may not be a household name, in the world of comics Jim Shoot
Red Plenty Book Review
While the “Russia” shelves of American bookstores groan under the weight of heavy tomes on the horrors of Stalin and the Gulag, the relatively liberal period that followed has
One-Armed Gunslingers and Germans in Teepees: A Brief Guide to the Euro-Western
The Western is the quintessentially American genre. However played out it might seem at times, it offers an incredibly versatile context for near-mythic narratives about good and e
Review: Sandcastle and Robot
The other day I was watching a Channel 4 news segment about the now ubiquitous “occupy” facemasks, in which they dragged around the aged hippy & magician Alan Moore, introd
The Secret Afterlife of Roy Orbison
Had he lived, Roy Orbison would have been 75 this year. Here, Daniel Kalder writes about the Big O’s transcendental power… For me, like most people, memory is intricately inter
Explaining Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis
The private papers documenting his cosmic illumination by a pink laser have long gilded the PKD legend. Published at last, do they shed much light for the rest of us? Philip K Dick
Mr Blair Goes to Kazakhstan
Ah, Tony Blair—you can’t keep a good hustler down. One minute he’s singing the praises of formaldehyde at the opening of a methanol power plant in Azerbaijan (£90,000 for a