Of Cats and Elfins by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Reviewed by Harriet Just over a year ago I reviewed the newly published Handheld Press edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin, a collection of strange, glittering, fascinating stories,…
Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, by Barry Forshaw
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies When I started teaching popular fiction courses forty years ago, having always been more drawn to Jesse James than to Henry James, there were sneers aplenty…
Art Essentials: Impressionism by Ralph Skea
Review by Liz Dexter Another volume in the excellently done Art Essentials series, this volume on Impressionism is written by Ralph Skea, an artist and academic who has published several…
So Brightly at the Last by Ian Shircore
Review by Rob Spence In one important respect, this book was outdated at the moment it was published: its subject, Clive James, having endured a terminal illness for ten years,…
Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor
Review by Gill Davies Women read a lot more fiction than men; they also buy more books, attend writers’ events, blog, exchange ideas, and form reading groups. Helen Taylor’s research…
Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem
Translated by Louis Iribarne Review by Karen Langley Polish writer Stanislaw Lem was a prolific author of science fiction works, the most well known of which is “Solaris” (which has…
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Let’s face it: anything involving human tragedies, poverty, despair, abuse and crime offers a wealth of material for a novelist of any genre. At the risk…
Happy Ever After by C. C. MacDonald
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Adultery. It crops up everywhere. Few grown-up pastimes are as popular as disobeying the sixth Commandment. Where would novels, plays and movies be without it? It’s…
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
Review by Peter Reason I have on my desk three pieces of rock, collected during my ecological pilgrimage on in the west coast of Scotland, that I wrote about in…