SPIKE MAGAZINE

Bunhill Fields Burial Ground near Old Street in the City of London has been given Grade I protected status. Originally the Dissenters’ burial ground, one great names of English literature have tombs here, including William Blake, Daniel Defoe and John

Jayne Margetts Okay, so I listen to Thom Yorke, and enjoy reading books about people living with a gun pointed to their head. Call it entertainment, or living vicariously through others; apathy, black humour, a touch of the politically incorrect and

James McConalogue Atomised – Michel Houellebecq See all books by Michel Houellebecq at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Elementarteilchen DVD This film is terrifyingly humbling, sexually polite and bravely mundane in its philosophical exploration

James McConalogue The Possibility Of An Island – Michel Houellebecq See all books by Michel Houellebecq at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com “The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition

What the death of John Peel means for music Mark Richardson Margrave Of The Marshes – John Peel See all books by John Peel at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com A week before the death of the Radio One disc jockey John Peel, an interesting exercise

Jayne Margetts strolls down the angry and angst-filled school corridors of Zoe Trope Please Don’t Kill The Freshman – Zoe Trope See all books by Zoe Trope at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Post Columbine, High School is

Chris Hall talks to Patricia Duncker about sex, death and sending porn through the German postal system Speaking from her home in Aberystwyth on the day of the Stop the War rally, Patricia Duncker is excitedly bellowing

Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her novel Hallucinating Foucault “Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects that attract most of my attention.” So said the

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

Adrian Gargett on the writing of Paul Auster Paul Auster is not a realist. As the title of his latest book The Book of Illusions suggests, he inhabits a world of illusion. His novels are worldly, finely tuned, elegant

Sally-Ann Spencer The Dark Room – Rachel Seiffert See all books by Rachel Seiffert at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com We have all seen the photos – the terrible photos of skeletal corpses, the frightening pictures of uniformed

Dan Epstein talks to Wild Palms creator Bruce Wagner about his new novel I’ll Let You Go I first met Bruce Wagner in Los Angeles around the middle of 1997. I was and still am a rabid David Cronenberg afficionado.

With the publication of her new 75 year study The German Trauma, Eugene Byrne talks to Gitta Sereny Eugene Byrne For someone who’s spent most of her adult life staring into the abyss, Gitta Sereny laughs a heck of a lot. “I love to laugh.

Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction” ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his prose or his physiognomy

Robin Askew When We Die – Cedric Mims See all books by Cedric Mims at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same time, urine is passed and semen

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

Nathan Cain Last Words – William Burroughs See all books by William Burroughs at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered

Mark Ostrowski meets Lesley Himes, widow of the late, great Chester Himes Women without men: María survived Borges; Linda Lee, Bukowski; Mary, Hemingway; and Lesley, Himes. Women who dealt with their husbands’ blindness, alcoholism, mental disorders,

Chris Mitchell Even in death, Timothy Leary is still trying to shatter society’s taboos. Design For Dying appears eighteen months after the former Harvard psychologist turned LSD guru passed away from prostate cancer. Written during

Adam Baron When I was teaching English in the Slovak Republic a few years ago, I was told the story of Elizabeth Bathory, “the blood sucking Countess of Cahtice,” a town in Slovakia which used to be part of Hungary.