For many of us (particularly if you were fortunate enough to be born in the 70s or 80s), America was introduced to us at a tender, impressionable age thanks to Hollywood’s far-reaching and never-ending power.
For Hadley Freeman, American movies of the 1980s taught her everything she needed to know: comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Trading Places; all a teenager needs to know – in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action – Top Gun, Die Hard, Young Sherlock Holmes, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex – in 9 ½ Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, Bull Durham; and family fun – in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood and Lean On Me. Read more…
MUNNU, the graphic novel, is the astonishing debut from Kashmir based illustrator Malik Sajad. We asked Malik about the concept of the novel; where did the idea come from? Why a graphic novel? What is it about the Kashmir’s torrid conflict you wanted to explore?
I came to know about this medium around 9 years ago. There were no graphic novels in the bookstores in Kashmir. Read more…
This month is an exciting one for 4th Estate (as they all are). We’re publishing four novels from debut authors; one funny, unflinching insider’s view on the generation born in the 1980s by Claire Lowdon, one beautiful, heartrending graphic novel set in a conflict-ridden Kashmir in the nineties drawn by Malik Sajad, TWO novels (in beautiful box-set form) from Nell Zink, both hardly alike, but each winding between the themes of love, marriage sexuality and racism, reminding us just how tricky and inhumane human nature can be. Read more…
What do you do next when you have walked on the moon at 30? How do you find direction in life when your career his peaked, with the first perfect 10 in Olympic competition, at the age of 14? How do you move on after piloting an aircraft through a crash in which you save hundreds, but a further hundred died? Read more…
Green Glowing Skull, the upcoming novel from This is the Way author Gavin Corbett, is a half-crazed brain-shunt of a trip around the dream world, the spirit world, the cyber world and a woozily recognisable real world. A darkly comic tale of mythologies, machines and the metaphysical swirl, the book is uniquely written and is more than memorable. Here’s what happened when book blogger John Self gave it a spin… Read more…
‘London is returning to the chaotic bestiary it once was’
Earlier this week a family of otters ransacked my garden. I only know this because they left behind an inordinate amount of dung, mostly in the porch, making my house look like the target of an over-enthusiastic hate mailer. The Suffolk locals tell me not to worry. Read more…
