JAMES WALSH recommends an exceptional documentary about the experience of Western doctors in Gaza
Latest editorial
You don't need it but you want it
ANDY HEDGECOCK admires a virtuoso collection of short stories that chronicle 21st century alienation and the cruelties of consumerism
Anti-consumerist graffiti ‘Consume yourself’
[EdgarFabiano/CC]
KEVIN DONNELLY suggests that the task of transforming cultural spaces is far from over and that photography still has a key role to play
RITA DI SANTO talks to Scottish-Irish filmmaker MARK COUSINS about his new panorama of world cinema The Story of Documentary Film
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
New releases from Shearwater, Florry, and Navy Blue
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need
Adam Marek
Comma Press, £10.99
ADAM MAREK is a virtuoso of the bizarre short tale. In this collection, his third, he tackles the absurdities and philosophical conundrums of modern life with elegant sentences, bleak wit and experimental flair.
In Poppins, a machine intelligence addresses its owner. Initially presenting itself as a user manual, it veers into a sales pitch before adopting a more sinister role. One of the collection’s most disturbing pieces, and one of its funniest, it challenges our assumptions about agency, empowerment and consumer choice.
Opposing attitudes to AI-based Magic Reality threaten an already fading friendship in It’s a Dinosaurooorph Dumdum. Things get worse when the excruciating small talk of an ill-starred dinner party is interrupted by a shocking revelation. Marek mixes restrained dissection of middle-class manners with speculation about the tension between what is real and what is bearable. It works brilliantly.
Similar stories
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an entertaining, useful guide to the threats and promises of mathematical rationality
ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant hijack of 1001 Nights to push aside the boundaries set by others