Mark Charan Newton

Hefner style… If you’re going to have a party, this man knows how to do it. I like to think of myself as an enlightened man, but still, you have to credit the dude.
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Now, it’s not like the Independent newspaper to scaremonger and take a holier-than-thou approach to news, oh no… But here’s a scaremongering article on the death of the printed page and the rise of the e-book.
In just a few short years, MP3 downloads and the iPod changed the face of the music industry. CDs are [...]

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Apologies for the incoherency of this, but it’s coming over as strands of thoughts…
Following up certain debates doing the rounds, I can’t help but think of one essential question at the moment. It might seem a bit of a tangent, but I suspect it’s central to most debates.
Should people read fiction for entertainment or [...]

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Someone came onto this site searching for “evangelical bookseller”. They were probably quite disappointed. If that search came this way again, perhaps a minor diversion here?
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Jeff VanderMeer has a few things to say about the state of fiction today.
I was reading through an old batch of Interzones and New Worlds while Ann and I selected stories for the New Weird anthology, and I thought I caught a glimpse of something different. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it’s a myopic nostalgia for [...]

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Because it’s so mellow. This man, Mr Bill Evans, knows his chords all right. To be played when dark. Goes down well with a glass of Willunga 100.
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So, last night I was on a local publishing panel, in Derby, as part of a literature festival. There were around thirty or so in the crowd, which was quite nice for milling around and general chit chat afterwards. I got a lot of the questions. Since I’m a commercial editor, I kind of felt [...]

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He’s not the first author I think of when someone mentions book trailers. I think it’s great, don’t get me wrong. But it just doesn’t seem very… him. Not that I know him, only his books. Maybe that’s it then. It just doesn’t seem something you’d do with his books, something you could do with [...]

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So, there appears to be some debate around the Internet, about ‘quality fantasy’. Firstly, there was this from literary guru, M John Harrison.
Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”. I don’t care what kind of underpants [...]

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