Given the power of the live experience, MIK SABIERS recommends Jon Spencer’s new album
IN JANUARY And Other Stories kicked off its inspiring Year of Publishing Women with the welcome publication of a new collection of Ann Quinn's short works, Unmapped Country. She was a much-underappreciated British experimental writer from the 1960s and contemporary of BS Johnson and Alan Burns, whose work paved the way for the bracing feminist fictions of Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker.
This avant-garde spirit is thankfully still alive across the pond in Ben Marcus's Notes from the Fog (Granta) and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties (Serpent's Tail), showing there are writers still bending fiction into invigorating new forms to represent the sense of the uncanny.
For us deficient English-speaking monoglots, it's been another rich year for translated fiction. In February, Penguin published Michael Hofmannn's new translation of Alfred Doblin's 1929 modernist masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz, scandalously out of print for many years, while Edinburgh-based Charco Press have gone from strength to strength since their 2016 launch.
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
Looking for moral co-ordinates after a tough year for rational political thinking and shared human morality
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
HENRY BELL notes the curious confluence of belief, rebuilding and cheap materials that gave rise to an extraordinary number of modernist churches in post-war Scotland


