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Tuff by Paul Beatty

September 23, 2026

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A Bright Moon For Fools by Jasper Gibson

Dipsomaniacal - an apt description of most Christmas's round mine... Ah, what would be a review penned by yours truly without some sort of grovelling apology at the outset? A better review no doubt, but that aside I can't help but continue the tiresome tradition with an apology. Sorry to my regular robotic readers (hi bots!) but I have been very neglectful of the blog of late, having been tied up with my pursuit of a broader spectrum of dilettantism; I've been taking part in a number of MOOCs offered by various HEIs on the FutureLearn platform. Worth checking out if you ask me. (Subtle enough plug, you think?) Anyway, the break afforded by a foray into further education has proved something of a test for Jasper Gibson and his fiction. In truth, it took me a little while to remember what exactly the novel was about, who was in it, and how I felt about the whole thing. Instant alarm bells. Of course, having had a break, I'd had a good crack at filling my h...

Dead Writers In Rehab by Paul Bassett Davies

But how do dead people kill themselves? Dead people like me. I'm dead. Another laudatory post about Unbound should surely follow had I the heart to go on and on about them again. I do but I won't in this instance, as they've just somehow bilked from me £60 for an as yet unwritten historical novel inspired by a TV script by Anthony Burgess, the dastards. I do it to myself and that's etc. One definite pleasure of the crowdfunding model, for us end users, is the delayed gratification, something with which I, and it would seem the main character in this novel, have no small difficulty. I had sort-of forgotten this book was in the offing, only for it to land suddenly in my wheelie bin one sunny morning (it wouldn't fit through the letterbox). I was delighted to be reminded. It also came at a fortuitous time. I've been unwell and looking for distractions to keep me from internet mischief in my restlessness (being ill is mostly boring). After finishing th...

Tales From Two Pockets by Karel Čapek

Awesomeness? Czech! Here is a quick but predictable disclaimer before we begin – this is another book which guilt has led me to select to read over other more contemporary and “exciting” works, more recently purchased or enthused over. In addition, it wasn’t even the first Čapek book I picked up due to this niggling neglectfulness*. How does this fit with the coincidence-guided intertextual flow of text selection premise, the “cause and effect” effect? you might ask. Shut up! I might say. Equally predictably, next comes the contextual bit, where you get to see how well researched these reviews are and I get to feel smug that I actually cribbed it all from one online encyclopaedia or other. Čapek is a Czech writer of immense talent, one of two equally gifted brothers, writing in whatever country the Czech Republic used to be between 1900 and 1938 (Bohemia? Czechoslovakia?). Luckily for him, as a resident of the Nazi-annexed Sudetenland, he died of pneumonia before the nau...

Horse Destroys The Universe by Cyriak Harris

I think our horse might be eating the internet. So, I hear you ask, what the utter fuck? To be honest, I pledged to the crowd-funding of this book purely on the premise that a horse could destroy the universe, which essentially, and spoiler-free (it’s in the chuffing title after all) it does. After that, this entire review is based on the research I did this morning between sitting at my desk and actually starting the work I’m paid to do (around 60-80 minutes all told). First off, Morgan Cyriak Harris is an animator who enjoys the surreal effects of the formal Western Art Tradition technique of mis en abyme , or in other words, the deliberate placing within an image of a copy of the same image and the subsequent implication of infinitely represented worlds – think two mirrors reflecting each other. In literary terms this could be the self-reflexive embedding of the story within the story, something of which I am inordinately fond. In Harris’s work this te...

A Child Across The Sky by Jonathan Carroll

Ever try looking happy when you've just been scared shitless? I don't have a problem, per se, with Jonathan Carroll. Indeed, I've long enjoyed hoarding his novels with a view to drip-feeding them into my life as and when the whim takes me. I have fond memories of The Land of Laughs, and even though, in parts, Bones Of The Moon annoyed me, I was uplifted and happy to have read it. A Child Across The Sky returns us to Bones... characters Cullen and Weber once more, this time related from the point of view of the former film director and latterly the director of a theatre company of terminal cancer patients in New York, Weber Gregston. His best friend and occasional collaborator, Philip Strayhorn has killed himself, in unusual circumstances, leaving behind him a legacy of horror movies, magical video tapes and an angel named Pinslepe, who may or may not be the angel of death and is also pregnant with Strayhorn's ex-partner Sasha, who in turn is pregnant...

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Tuff by Paul Beatty

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