Product Description

‘A book full of richness, unexpected enticements, short sharp shocks and breathtaking writing’ Guardian Welcome to the real, unauthorised London: the disappeared, the unapproved, the unvoiced, the mythical and the all-but forgotten. The perfect companion to the city. ‘Exhilarating, truly wonderful, a cavalcade of eloquent writing. London demands an anthology like this to remind us of the irascible quirkiness of its residents, and we have Sinclair to thank for marshalling such a perverse and ultimately pleasurable exercise’ Independent on Sunday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83127 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

About the Author
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor’s Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters, London Orbital and Dining on Stones. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances. Iain Sinclair lives in Hackney, East London.

Customer Reviews

City of Disappointments ; A wasted opportunity
An ambitious volume which brings up some real gems courtesy of Marina Warner, Anthony Frewin, Will Self, Bill Drummond but precious few others. I can't help feeling that Mr Sinclair should have given his contributors a tighter brief or at least been a bit more generous with the scissors in the final edit. Eventually the writings become more and more disparate until what you get is an anthology of work all loosely connected to the capital in some way. Some of the entries (especially Sinclair's own ones) are genuinely baffling and the reader is given frustratingly little explanation to their appearance; if this is deliberate, it doesn't work.

If readers are looking for decent anthologies of London social history, myth and ephemera, there are other compendiums on the market that are far more worthwhile.

Perfect to dip into
Like Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair is fond of a non-linear approach to the history and geography of a city and this collection of essays snakes around the mystery of London in much the same way as Ackroyd's "London: A Biography".

Perhaps because this is a compilation rather than a work by a single author, it's been more easily accepted as a fascinating fund of anecdote and history which doesn't need to adopt a chronological approach. Intermittently thrilling - and perfect to dip in and out of.

Jobs for the boys
IS creates an opportunity for some of his sycophantic cronies to cash in on his "name" hence the inclusion of at least one too many obscure and overblown unknowns