Given the power of the live experience, MIK SABIERS recommends Jon Spencer’s new album
Berg
by Ann Quin
(And Other Stories, £10)
FOLLOWING the warmly received publication of Ann Quin’s previously uncollected shorter prose, And Other Stories continue their “Quinaissance” with their reissue of her marvellous 1964 debut Berg.
It’s a gritty yet deliciously strange masterpiece of British fiction in which a man called Berg, who’s changed his name to Greb, comes to a seaside town intending to kill his father and thus begins the quest of a hair restoration product salesman to wreak vengeance on his absent parent.
CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family
WILL STONE applauds a fine production that endures because its ever-relevant portrait of persecution


