CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
Latest editorial
Offbeat collection breaks boundaries of crime fiction
TONY BURKE speaks to JOEL McIVER, co-author of the biography of bluesman John Mayall
A misfit couple unhappily ever after, a dead man walking, dodgy journos, and trench art trucking
New releases from Javon Jackson, IZE Trio, and Mal Waldron Trio
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an intriguing multi-layered depiction, dominated by a stunning impersonation of Marilyn herself
EWAN CAMERON marvels at the impossible ambition, realised with dreamlike finesse of translating Italo Calvino to the stage
Crimewave 13: Bad Light
(TTA Press, £12)
THE dozen pieces in Crimewave 13 explore a broadly common theme — the utter blurring of the traditional boundaries between the criminal and the victim, with the trajectories and locations of each of the stories quite distinct from each other and the clever use of partial perspectives confounding the reader throughout.
Morning Star reviewer Mat Coward gives a criminal’s view of the inherent contradictions within capitalism as identified by Karl Marx’s hypothesis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in a story in which, alternatively menacing and cartoonish, local tough guy Top and his diminished band of hangers-on journey through an economically squeezed town to discover why their customer base no longer has the readies to pay for their product.
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Claims that Nicaragua has abolished elections followed a headline that stripped Daniel Ortega’s remarks of their historical and political context. The full speech tells a different story, says BECCA RENK FOSTER
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book