MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
A lot to answer for
FIONA O’CONNOR admires a collection that is a riposte to the armies of developers, estate agents, private capital speculators and their marketeers
The four new tower blocks built around Deansgate Square dominate the skyline. Their 21st century design contrasting with the nineteenth century architecture of the Knott Mill (now Deansgate) Station (a Grade II listed building).
[David Dixon/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Book Of Manchester: A City In Short Fiction
Edited by David Sue, Comma Press, £10.99
“A few stops before town she came down with her nose in her handbag, after a cig. She got off and stayed at the stop awhile, cupping her hands to light up. When she crossed he leapt off at the last second and followed her to Hulme, keeping her well ahead. Between them were bikes, prams, old biddies hunched in saris bobbing into the greengrocers, skinny Jamaicans leaning outside a café... A line of big lads gave him f***off stares and he walked in the road to get by.”
Tom Benn’s description of an obsessive son following his mother into her secret life pulls focus on a city teeming with stories.
It is one of a dozen pieces on the great northern metropolis brought together in this compendium from Comma Press. With its back-story of gothic ambition, industrialised slavery to dark Satanic mills, protest movements and insurgent music scene, Manchester arrives ready-branded for the imagination. Updating the story, twelve writers conjure contemporary life against a backdrop of poverty, crime and excess.
More from this author
FIONA O'CONNOR recommends a biography that is a beautiful achievement and could stand as a manifesto for the power of subtlety in art
FIONA O’CONNOR is fascinated by a novel written from the perspective of a neurodivergent psychology student who falls in love
FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
