GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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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]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
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.
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