SPIKE MAGAZINE

Chris Mitchell [Ed note - this interview was conducted before Abby Lee's real identity was revealed by a "quality" Sunday newspaper days after the publication of GWAOTM. You can read about Abby being stalked by journalists and the subsequent fallout

Nick Mitchell Psychoraag – Suhayl Saadi See all books by Suhayl Saadi at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com NM: First of all, congratulations on Psychoraag, a wonderfully ambitious and enjoyable novel. What was your inspiration for

Chris Mitchell Suicide: No Compromise – David Nobakht See all music by Suicide at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide. I would have

Chris Mitchell 4 Play – Irvine Welsh [collected scripts of plays based on Welsh's work] See all books by Irvine Welsh at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com [Note: this is the complete text of a syndicated interview with Harry

Chris Mitchell The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions – Joshua Davis See all books by Joshua Davis at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Joshua Davis set out to win. At anything. Living in a crappy apartment

Chris Mitchell The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in A Burmese Teashop, The Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country that tries to understand

Chris Mitchell A collection of essays from women working in the US porn industry and women consuming porn outside it, Naked Ambition is an intelligent and provocative survey of pro-porn female opinions. There’s little in the way of gushing praise

Chris Mitchell These days I’m reduced to randomly choosing new music at the bootleg CD stalls on Bangkok’s streets. I don’t bother with the music press anymore so I have no idea who’s up and coming, who to find out about, who

Chris Mitchell The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture – John Battelle See all books by John Battelle at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com John Battelle’s The Search is more than just

Thailand’s answer to Graham Greene Christopher G. Moore has a caffeinated conversation with Chris Mitchell Recently I met up with Christopher G. Moore, a Canadian novelist who’s been living in Bangkok for almost 20 years and writing pretty

Chris Mitchell Music is the best mood-alterer we have. Put on a record and you can find yourself grinning involuntarily a few moments later; conversely, stand in an elevator for more than a few seconds involuntarily listening to crackly saxophone-driven

Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Distraught isn’t

Chris Mitchell on the abomination that is Pixar’s latest The Incredibles. No no no. Sick and wrong. Until now, digital animation had been synonymous not so much with great computer generated cartoons as great scripts – Toy Story,

Chris Mitchell This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories is actually a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in the fate of

Chris Mitchell The Accursed Mountains: Journeys In Albania – Robert Carver See all books by Robert Carver at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com This is truly an armchair traveller’s book: Robert Carver delivers a fascinating account of his

Chris Mitchell Jarhead – Anthony Swofford See all books by Anthony Swofford at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Jarhead documents Swofford’s time in the US Marine Corps in the run up to Gulf War One – as a personal insight into the

Chris Mitchell Problems Are Us…Or Is It Just Me? – Colin Feltham See all books by Colin Feltham at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Colin Feltham’s book is a concerted attack on the self-help industry and an uncompromising questioning

Chris Mitchell The Book Of Fuck – Ben Myers See all books by Ben Myers at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your name forever

Chris Mitchell Raise The Titanic! – Clive Cussler See all books by Clive Cussler at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com You can’t argue with that exclamation mark. Another milestone on my quest to rediscover classic thrillers, Raise

Chris Mitchell Stasiland – Anna Funder See all books by Anna Funder at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, fifteen years after first reading it. Orwell’s future vision

Chris Mitchell Field Of Vision: The Broadcast Life Of Kenneth Allsop – Mark Andresen See all books by Mark Andresen at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Biography is often the most satisfying of all literary genres; other people’s

Chris Mitchell Double Fold – Nicholson Baker See all books by Nicholson Baker at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com For bibliophiles, this is something of a horror story. Double Fold is a journalistic tour de force of the wholesale destruction

Chris Mitchell Slow Dance On The Fault Line – Donald Rawley See all books by Donald Rawley at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com LA may be the City Of Angels, but in Donald Rawley’s debut collection of short stories, it’s

Chris Mitchell 21 Dog Years: Doing Time At Amazon.com – Mike Daisey See all books by Mike Daisey at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com I hesitate to call Mike Daisey’s book profound but it’s certainly got a lot more depth

Chris Mitchell The efforts of unsigned bands are something I usually prefer to pass over in silence. There’s a simple reason why many bands remain unsigned: because they’re bloody awful. Or, perhaps more accurately,