Product Description

Stewart Home is the internationally-acclaimed author of "Red London", "69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess" ("Canongate", 2002), "Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton" ("Do-Not Press", 2004) and "Tainted Love" ("Virgin Books", 2005), among others. His new book, "Memphis Underground", documents his obsessions with Soul music and the theory and practice of art while marking another step up in his progress as one of the country's most fascinating avant-garde writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #248846 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Review
'Home is reconfiguring books as explosive elements - pages so stuffed with ideas that they might go off in your hands.' The Independent 'An author with a deranged, subversive grip on literary form and an envious skill for describing harsh landscape sparingly and beautifully.' The Times "Home is hilarious, brilliant, annoying, and comes up with a new and original map for inventive readers." Lynne Tillman

About the Author
Stewart Home is the internationally-acclaimed author of Red London, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (Do-Not Press, 2004) and Tainted Love (Virgin Books, 2005), among others.

Customer Reviews

Anti Novel
This curious and disconcerting book is split three ways between a story about an artist-in-residence in Orkney, a would-be music entrepreneur in East London, and a purported diary of Stewart Home's cultural activities in the UK and across Europe. By the end, the three stories have overlapped and more or less come together. In Orkney, some of the inhabitants are dead celebrities - like Princess Diana and Stephen Milligan - and the military seem to be behind everything; the whole sequence is bizarre and dreamlike. (There is a great scene though where the artist tries to explain his painting of a white question mark on a white background to a sceptical local.) In London, the narrator does various dead-end jobs, suffers housing problems, and is finally forced out of his council flat. The Stewart Home section describes readings, travel, winning awards, and meeting friends who are invariably also cultural types. There is a lot of repetition, unnecessary detail, laboured humour, name-dropping and general dullness as characters go on at excruciating length about house prices, the nouveau roman, soul music and what they had for dinner. This dullness is of course all entirely deliberate, but in case we haven't twigged this, we also get told (even more laboriously) how it is deliberate, and why: because this is an anti-novel. Well, OK. Stewart Home is brilliant, unique, politically sound, entirely uncompromising, and always worth reading - but unless you're already a fan, it's probably better to start with something with a bit more oomph, like Slow Death or Pure Mania.