Zen Cymru
by Peter Finch
Seren Press; Paperback;
72 pages; Price £7.99;
ISBN:978-1-85411-500-3
Rory Waterman
Cardiff does not have a Poet Laureate, but if it did Peter Finch would surely be a shoo-in. Few poets enjoy Finch’s popularity or ooze such a sense of place, and this has been reflected in countless commissioned poems for the city, several of which make their way into Zen Cymru. He is also a brash, innovative, prolific and furiously up-to-date performer of his work, and the back cover of this collection states that ‘his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic …

Alex Christofi
And when the light came, the darkness was confused and flew under the skirting. We tried to get it out with a broom handle and a ruler but it was like the time my friend’s room was infested with ladybirds which bred like ladybirds in her wainscot. I made the others leave and tried to coax it out. We talked about everything the moon and space what the darkness wanted to be when it grew up but still it hugged the insulation between the walls like a blanket. Eventually …

THE LAST PATRIARCH
Najat El-Hachmi
Serpent’s Tail; Paperback; 306 pages; ISBN 9781846687174; RRP £9.99
Published April 29th 2010
Alice Kelly
Najat El-Hachmi’s debut novel, The Last Patriarch (L’últim patriarca in Catalan), is effectively three stories in one: simultaneously a trauma narrative of abuse, an immigration narrative and a female bildungsroman. As a bestseller in Spain and the worthy winner of the prestigious Ramon Llull Prize in 2008 – which, at ninety thousand Euros last year, is the most renumerative prize in Catalan letters –its UK publishers, Serpent’s Tail, are keen to repeat that success over …

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Hamish Hamilton; Boxed Set Paperbacks; 672 pages;
9780241141823; Price £18.99
Michael Sopp
It seems that if you open any novel written by a man in the last decade there’s a good chance its protagonist will be a prepubescent genius. It’s difficult to trace the origins of this phenomenon. In England at least it may have something to do with Mark Haddon’s best-selling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and its autistic, prime-number-obsessed narrator, which seems to have spawned a literary virus that has since spread across …

Will Self is a prolific writer of both fiction and journalism. His most recent publication, Psycho Too, is a collection of the ‘Psychogeography’ columns he wrote for several years in The Independent, accompanied by drawings by Ralph Steadman.
Self has a daunting public persona, as his varied appearances on television and radio indicate. For this reason I was somewhat nervous on approaching his London home and made even more so at his startled, staring reaction on discovering that I don’t take sugar in my tea. However, once ensconced in his writing …

Eley Williams
We tug along the cats’ eyes, thinking of you.
Below us the roadkill is a pheasant rainbowfaced, and the radio and I
Are spaniel tenors, just bawlin’, darlin’:
Sit in on our traffic jamming.
We’ll sing you the hairpins, and the zebras, and the bottlenecks.
Crested beauties, breasted cuties; yeah, I’m-a gonna do that all day ‘til you roll those pretty amber eyes right out.
To think: all these pedestrians are allowed faces, but none of them are yours!
We got you all atomised, my piñata: we always drive singing from you,
But also, somehow, always, to …

A JURY OF HER PEERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS FROM ANNE BRADSTREET TO ANNIE PROULX
Elaine Showalter
Virago, Hardback, 400pp.,ISBN 978-1844080786, Price: £22.50
Janette Currie
In her latest book, Elaine Showalter revisits the contested territory of her pioneering study of English women writers, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977). A Jury of Her Peers concentrates on the American counterparts and as such, attempts to reshape American literary heritage. Showalter aims to make the “invisible visible” by shining a light on “neglected” and “forgotten” …

SIR FRANK KERMODE is the author of many influential works of literary criticism and has been a major presence in the critical landscape for the second half of the Twentieth Century. He talks to The Literateur about academic careers, the dubious pleasures of Theory, the role of the critic, and the end of the world.
Tom Bailey
The Literateur: Sir Frank, it’s a privilege to be here to interview you today. Thank you very much for giving your time.
First off, you have been some years outside of the academic machine now – …