My Top 10 Experimental Thrillers piece, including Marguerite Duras’ brilliant L’Amante Anglaise (seen here in Grove Press’s beautiful, 1968, Evergreen Black Cat edition) went live on Guardian Books. It is one of many articles, interviews etc. commissioned around publication of The Fountain in the Forest on 4 January.

Gertrude Stein once said fiction that merely related events was no longer interesting in an age of ubiquitous mass media. But Stein remained fascinated by literature, specifically the detective novel, which she considered the singularly modern fictional form. When the man or woman in question is dead from the start, you’re done with mere events before page one. Furthermore: “In real life … it is the crime that is the thing the shock the thrill the horror but in the story it is the detection that holds the interest.” [READ MORE…]

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‘Under the Paving Stones’ — Faber Social and Tony White present a night of experimental fiction with Iphgenia Baal, Kirsty Gunn, Stewart Home, Joanna Walsh, Tony White and Eley Williams – 19 February 7:00 pm.

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