One of my favourite publications, The Fence, have a new, beautiful book out called The Pub, published by Penguin/Ebury Press: featuring the best, and the blurst, of British pubs. I was delighted to be asked to contribute, and wrote about one of my favourite pubs down in Devon, that I’ve been going to my whole life (mentioned in Hermit – it was the pub with all the mummers).
Seen a lot of manifestos being published recently? Manifestos are in the zeitgeist again, but his time it’s different. For Literary Review I wrote about what commercialisation means for manifestos and their movements. How radical can something mass market be? Read online here.
Or in print here:
I’ve got a little review in the latest TLS of artist and writer Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook — a dead spooky collection of ghost stories for the 21st Century. Check it out …
I wrote a piece for The Millions about how, in 1979, Italo Calvino predicted the AI author in one of his best-loved novels, and what the reality of that prediction now means for us writers, poets, journalists and translators, Can a machine ever compete in metaphysical matters? What happens to an author’s copyright when a machine learning algorithm “learns” from an author’s work? And what happens when something learns from only “good” works. Click here to read.
