The Guardian (Free subscription) | 17/08/2008
Review: Drivetime by James MeekHe captures isolation in a world full of people and noise and punctuates it with moments of delicious fantasy says Mary Fitzgerald
PREA Prez (Free subscription) | 07/08/2008
I was going to post this on Tuesday, but I’m playing catch up. The Sun-Times columnist, Mary Mitchell defends Senator Meeks’ plan to bring Chicago students to New Trier on opening day. It is time for drastic measures. Treat it like a human rights violation. As Meeks pointed out, when blacks got fed up with segregated schools, they marched, [...]
London Review of Books (Free subscription) | 23/07/2008
Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There's Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He's holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the...
Breaking the Fourth Wall (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
I've had this book on my reading list for a couple of years and finally got to it. I've never read anything but good about it, but actually struggled at about 100 pages over whether or not I wanted to finish it. There are a lot of characters, all with Russian and Czech names, and the author makes the assumption that you know something about what happened in Siberia in the first World War. I thought...
k-punk (Free subscription) | 11/08/2008
As No Leniency suggests, James Meek's piece on water privatisation in the LRB confirms much of what Owen claimed in this post. What's clear from Meek's article is the essential libidinal function that government plays in capitalist realism. It...
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 07/08/2008
Are you in the mood for love? The Times has six very good short short stories on the theme written by Matt Thorne, Lionel Shriver, James Meek, Jilly Cooper, Adele Parks and Tim Lott. Best of all there's the invitation for you to write your own love story in 300 words. If you want something a bit more substantial, over at the Boston Globe there's a list of ten great novels to read when...
Scotsman.com (Free subscription) | 14/08/2008
... past, instead living with it cheek by jowl, like unexploded land mines.Journalist turned novelist James Meek made his own journey into Russia's past with his last acclaimed novel The People's Act of Love. Again under the shadow of current events, he decided to reflect on Ossetia, which he visited in 1992 to report on an act of ethnic cleansing.He traced his journey from war correspondent...
the Literary Saloon (Free subscription) | 23/07/2008
In The keys to the kingdom of fiction in The Guardian they note that: 'The Villa Gillet has been asking writers who attend the International Forum on the Novel to select a word which underpins their work. Jonathan Lethem, Adam Thirlwell, Nuruddin Farah and James Meek explain how the words they've chosen are key to their writing'.
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
The Villa Gillet has been asking writers who attend the International Forum on the Novel to select a word which underpins their work. Jonathan Lethem, Adam Thirlwell, Nuruddin Farah and James Meek explain how the words they've chosen are key to their writing
Credo / Mark Oliver (Free subscription) | 20/07/2008
By the end, this novel really got under my skin. It is former Guardian journalist James Meek's first book since his highly regarded, wonderful book The People's Act of Love. We Are Now Beginning our Descent is about a war...
