Database Nation...

Interesting article in The Guardian on Monday about the databases of information held on us:
"Amazon is hoping to patent ways of interrogating a database that would record not just what its 59 million customers have bought - which it already knows - or what they would like to buy (which, with their wish lists, they tell the world) but their income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. The company, of course, already knows who we are and where we live."

If You Only Read One Review...

...read this one. Very encouraging words in the Independent on Sunday from Matt Thorne.

Moving To Rhyl

New quotes:
"A brave and ambitious treatise on modern England.. a weird and wonderful trip" - i-D

"A black and baroque talent" - Tribune

"Few debut novelists display the ambition shown by Will Ashon in Clear Water... a unique and spell-binding tale that heralds the arrival of a major new talent" - Rhyl & Prestatyn Journal

When I was a kid I went on a school trip to North Wales and, one wet and grey day, we ended up at the Rhyl leisure centre. And it had a wave machine and slides and a giant octopus, which was bascially sci-fi stuff 25 years ago. So, I like to believe that Rhyl was and remains ahead of its time...

...End Quotes

Great write up in the Independent on Sunday this morning as part of their Fifty Hot Books For Summer:

"Startlingly original and defiantly British... Ashon is a major new talent."

Begin Quotes...

Some press quotes:

"A shiny, hyper-modern dream of Eden is here stripped to its bloody heart... a realism that can include moments of sheer, quiet, sad poetry... watch this space, because Ashon can really write" - The Guardian

"A brawny, dystopian novel that never loses its Orwellian sense of humour … Clear Water is a rewarding novel that signals the arrival of a skilled cultural commentator." - Time Out

"There is an impressive imagination at work here and... flashes of brilliance in the writing." - The New Statesman

"A weird and wonderful look at the dreadful side of modern England" - Esquire

"Extraordinary... A superbly written exposé of consumer society and contemporary mores by a prodigious new talent." - The Book Magazine

"A darkly comic critique of Britain... every bit as encompassing as a Don De Lillo novel... an extremely compelling book" - Flux

"Not often is Englishness and all it means treated with the same extended examination as Clear Water provides; as such this is an important novel; one which is as compelling, funny and accessible as it is literary." - Blowback

"A remarkable, darkly funny, addictive and far ranging novel" - Clash

The Return of Mr Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon's new book is apparently out this December (a mere 992 pages long) and the man himself has posted his own description of it at Amazon.com. The fact that his publishers took the notice down thinking it was the work of a spoofer until he contacted them and told them to put it back up perhaps suggests that all the information he gives may not be entirely accurate. Unless no one at the publishers has seen it yet...

Either way, it takes care of my Christmas list. And everyone else's Christmas presents. And birthday presents. Etc.

Going Underground...

A strange, obsessive site with too many exclamation marks, but very satisfying in its own London Underground-crazed way and with a marvellous pic of the Queen on the Victoria Line. Which I've stolen.

Going Underground