I was educated in the so-called ‘university of life’, before eventually going to a few proper universities, and returning to live in my old hometown in Essex—after spending far too long making loud music and a nuisance of myself in South London. My literary references are eclectic, but I thought I would focus my book recommendations on the anti-hero who comes from the world of French and American dirty realism. It should alert the reader to the kind of novels I write, although they're highly structured crime thrillers, with a heavy dose of very dry, sardonic sense of humor. Finally, the sequel to my latest novel should be ready for publication in 2023.
The novel is narrated by a young career villain Steven Mason, who lives on a run-down housing estate along the fringes of London and Essex. He is tasked by his gangland boss (nicknamed Grandad) to track down his missing girlfriend Dominique. However, Steven knows things are not going to be simple when he discovers a frozen hand in Mickey Finn's old fridge. Steven then travels up to London with his mate Anthony (a junkie artist who Grandad uses to launder money), to begin the search for Dominique. As Steven speaks to people connected with her, he begins to uncover a plot that is about revenge, money, power, and control. And it all centers on the dead hand, what is on the dead hand, and if it is Dominique’s.
Celine is the big daddy of low life, the snarling metronome of misanthropy. Nearly a hundred years since its publication, it is as fresh as a daisy and should convince anybody that writing about real-life and what you think has more merit than all the BS that goes into all the other literary BS you think you should be writing or reading, because someone told you it should be elevated above the ordinary. Celine says what he thinks, warts and all. (Although it did get out of hand later in his life when he goes full throttle antisemitic!) He puts all his prejudices out there, plus blood, pain, war, fear, colonialism, boredom, hypocrisy, intolerance, jealousy, greed, industrialisation, poverty, medicine, and love-torn envy in the classic French noir thriller ending. Look no further if you want to read the greatest novel ever written!
Celine's masterpiece-colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic-boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society's idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim's pitch-perfect translation captures Celine's savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.
The French have a peculiar sadomasochism, where they venerate the destitute, elevate them to romantic icons, and then wait to be spat on, by the very thing they applaud. This is Genet in a nutshell, a bourgeois-hating novelist and playwright (who makes Joe Orton sound like an infantile literary masturbator), who got around to putting his life down on paper with this novel, The Thief’s Journal. It is post-Celine, and predates Dirty Realism, and has caustic revelations of a petty criminal. He finds virtue in the sewers of Paris and Europe, like a Phantom dwelling artist whose dishonesty is part of a performance art exhibition.
Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.
The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel; an account of his impoverished travels across 1930s Europe. The narrator is guilty of vagrancy, petty theft and prostitution, but his writing transforms such…
When I read Junky, I could hear the soundtrack of Low Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, followed by the extended guitar solo on the live version of Heroin. This is Burroughs using a straightforward narrative before he decided to cut up everything and destroy the notion that there was any purpose to a beginning, middle, and end (see Naked Lunch and beyond!). Junkypulses with the desperation of an addict’s life in post-war New York and drifting down south to places like New Orleans and Mexico City. It’s a unique insight into a drug-infested lifestyle, before drugs became a fashionable accessory. It has authenticity dripping through it and is a testament to Burroughs own addiction, which at one point caused his father to collect him and move him back to live with his parents (just like Lou Reed did before he went on to ‘make it’!).
'Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.' Thus, one of the creative visionaries of the Beat movement recites the junk equation, the calculus by which heroin redefines the addict's world. Burroughs's quasi-autobiographical narrative makes for a raw, fragmented and disturbing account of hallucinations, ghostly nocturnal wanderings, strange sexual encounters and quests to ease the hunger of the needle. Read in the incantional tones of Burroughs himself, this legendary account is as shocking and powerful as it has ever been.
Selby got into writing late in his life (much like me!) but that doesn’t negate the richness of his five novels and the best one: Last Exit to Brooklyn. If you read about Selby’s life, he could just as easily write an autobiography and it would have proved that fact is stranger than fiction.Last Exit, is a pulled-together novel from his initial forays into creative writing and short fiction, but don’t worry about that, because the tales of down-and-out diversity are all jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-boggling, and gut-wrenching. These literary portraits capture the depravity of life at its finest juncture, between heaven and hell—but mainly hell!
Last Exit to Brooklyn remains undiminished in its awesome power and magnitude as the novel that first showed us the fierce, primal rage seething in America’s cities. Selby brings out the dope addicts, hoodlums, prostitutes, workers, and thieves brawling in the back alleys of Brooklyn. This explosive best-seller has come to be regarded as a classic of modern American writing.
I got around to reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a good thirty or so years after I had seen the film (which had a lasting impression on me). Whilst it would not be considered in the tradition of gritty realism, it has the underlying current of anti-hero and scathing critique of society. Vonnegut is one of those authors who has been catagorised by marketing as science fiction, but he is a supreme satirist, who takes cold steel to the bloated illusions about morality in war and the American Dream. He dices and slices, to leave the shredded reactionaries gasping for air on the desecrated altar of capitalism—it oozes the pus of hypocrisy and bursts a few boils!
A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
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