SPIKE MAGAZINE

Stephen Mitchelmore Oracle Night – Paul Auster See all books by Paul Auster at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every book. This was not

Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster, sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascination and regularity verging on schadenfreude

Stephen Mitchelmore Nowhere Without No – Maurice Blanchot See all books by Maurice Blanchot at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Not half way through the year but already a book has come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it

Stephen Mitchelmore The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations – Jacques Roubaud See all books by Jacques Roubaud at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel The Great

Stephen Mitchelmore Death And The Penguin – Andrey Kurkov See all books by Andrey Kurkov at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality

Stephen Mitchelmore "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there."  Maurice Blanchot How does one deal with trauma? It’s

Stephen Mitchelmore “Translating is only a more intense and more demanding form of what we do whenever we read” – JM Coetzee Coetzee might also have added “whenever we live”. Unless, like the dead,

Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-War journalism;

Stephen Mitchelmore Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger – Timothy Clark See all books by Timothy Clark at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com The Routledge Critical Thinkers series is turning into something special. Maurice Blanchot by

Stephen Mitchelmore finds Thomas Bernhard to be elusive within two studies of the Austrian writer What if everything we can be depends on playing a role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it would mean that the public self, the one

Stephen Mitchelmore Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald See all books by W.G. Sebald at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com (Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a

Stephen Mitchelmore This Is Not a Novel – David Markson See all books by David Markson at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com There’s always someone telling us that the novel is dead. And that is how it should be. As well as

Stephen Mitchelmore Proust and Signs – Gilles Deleuze See all books by Gilles Deleuze at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com This isn’t a new book. The French original was published in 1964 and in English eight years later. But

Stephen Mitchelmore Marcel Proust – Jean-Yves Tadie See all books by Jean-Yves Tadie at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com For a short time, I used to stay up most of the night. In the long summer months between school years

Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian, was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!” He didn’t

Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan “With a variable key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that

Stephen Mitchelmore Destiny – Tim Parks See all books by Tim Parks at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what happened

Stephen Mitchelmore Ravelstein – Saul Bellow See all books by Saul Bellow at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com "I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face. No one else on all this earth had such features. This was the most

Stephen Mitchelmore The Total Library – Jorge Luis Borges See all books by Jorge Luis Borges at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com The last story in The Book of Sand, a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, is itself called "The Book

Stephen Mitchelmore It is a commonplace that anyone brought up within a religious tradition and who has subsequently rejected it finds that its legacy runs deep. It is also a commonplace that the rejection often takes the form of the vacated space.

Stephen Mitchelmore on the music of Will Oldham Who is Will Oldham? Well, maybe he’d like to know first of all. As if in search of the proper one, he’s released LPs under several different names. Made famous by the Palace name (Palace Brothers,

Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death ‘Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur.’ (Borges) Like

Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran refuses explanation “Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on

Despite two recent authorative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore argues that Beckett remains an enigma It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease