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Just reading Bad Eminence by James Greer which has lots going on by is spoilt by being too knowing, too in love with its own cleverness. Also read a bunch of the stories in Polluted Sex by Lauren Foley - raw and direct, verging on the pornographic, short stories of a very different Irish writer...

The dialogue is so good. It sounds even better when she reads it. She talks about how she loves talking to taxi drivers who tell her all kinds of stuff. with regard to Barrett, if Young Skins is a kind of modern Dubliners then Homesickness is definitely him trying to not be defined by home. I...

It’s a brilliant high wire act. The insistent push of that voice is quite something. And it is dark as fuck while being silly funny too. Glad you’re enjoying it.

I hope you like it.

I’m not sure I feel the same. I work with lots of young men who do talk and think like that. Also lots of layers in there about the difference between the fantasy - whether it be the supposed glitz and glamour of free and easy sex online, the computer games violence, YouTube videos of executions...

Yes, I’ve seen her read a couple of times, the second time at the Social there were a number of her ex students there. I bet she’s a very sound teacher.

I read the review - a bit miserly in places. As for Wendy - I’ll give it a re-read. Did you read the previous collection, Sweet Home? There are a couple of stories in there that deserve to be in any anthology of the last decade of short stories.

I really love Samantha Schweblin- particularly those short stories. They really persist in the memory long after the book is back in the shelf - she’s someone who doesn’t use figurative language much (if at all) and that makes her even more uncomfortable to read. No comfort of metaphor or simile.

Theatre is communal and I think that when it works things that might not be hilarious alone can become so together. Some rather sloppy and sweeping statements about the comedies here, as I regularly say- they have to be seen and heard by a cast who can read verse - the best comedies can make...

Early novels were all often quite playful - stopping to talk to the reader, drawing attention to its own artifice. It’s something that remains well into the 19th C. I was reading a Trollope the other day that used many of these ideas - realism rises in the 19thC and for some it is what defines...

See he’s been shortlisted for the Booker. Hopefully might mean more of his back catalogue will get reprinted.

Just play all of Hejira, Hissing of Summer Lawns, search out the Hissing bootleg, then go full Don Juan.

I love that book. Never look at Charles Hawtry the same way again.

I love the Go Between - it plays into that strain of Lit that runs through Gatsby, Grand Meulnes, JL Cart’s Month in the Country, Proust even. the film is great too.

Creepy menacing etc makes me think of the great Gordon Burns novels like Alma Cogan and Fullalove. Also David Peace’s GB1984 and also a different dark but brutal Young Skins Colin Barrett’s short story collection.

Also got The Real and The Romantic about English Art between the wars by Frances Spalding. There’s been a renewed interest in this period, a major re-evaluation that has rescued many painters from being seen as ‘twee’ almost Betjemen like to radical, experimental and exciting. I’m enjoying her...

I’m reading PogueMahone by Patrick McCabe - coming across like a huge shaggy dog story with a cast of grotesques that turns into a dark meditation on trauma. Like a modern Flann O’Brien - one of the very best things I’ve read all year.

I think the PM is just a tool, like HR - it gives you some useful info like how long you can ride at a certain set of watts but in a road race when it goes, you have to go and hope that everyone else is maxed out too. In a TT it’s a different matter - you can calibrate your effort much more...

That Stannard win is just the nuts. Remember cheering him in my front room as he outplayed Quickstep. Pidcock was a world junior TT champ, so he’s no slouch at that and won the Baby Giro taking all the mountain stages, I think. Whether he is prepared to sacrifice at least one of the other...

I’ve been lucky enough to watch Pidcock since he was a junior - same age as my older son. Precocious talent. Wonder though if he’ll need to move elsewhere to get a pop at GC challenge. He’s very un-Sky/Ineos.