Latest editorial
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Present nightmare at the heart of a future American dream
PAUL SIMON recommends a novel on a US dystopia with its roots recognisably in the here and now
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Bindlestiff
by Wayne Holloway
(Influx Press, £9.99)
THERE are occasions when a novel deserves the sobriquet mould-breaking and one such is the publication of this tale of an African-American hobo by Wayne Holloway, which switches back and forth between a present-day film script and a dystopian future reality.
Bindlestiff – another term for a travelling itinerant – starts in the harsh factory of Hollywood as a script writer and director try to secure the money and the team to make a film about a “black Charlie Chaplin.”
But soon, the reader is shoved down a rabbit hole of a dysfunctional immediate future with the narrative following military veteran Frank Dubois as he travels across the mid-west of the US in 2036 to see his children after a decade-long absence.He works his passage by mending items that others, brought up in a throwaway culture, have no idea how to mend.
More from this author
An absorbing metaphor for contemporary Western societies is recommended by PAUL SIMON
PAUL SIMON falls under the spell of little known authors from an island at the edge of the world
