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Chase the Bears: Little Things to Achieve Big Dreams By Ric Keller Chase the Bears is an upbeat, part self-help book, part memoir from first-time author, seasoned attorney, and former [...]

PERIOD Dennis Cooper Serpent's Tail, 120pp, £8.99 £7.19 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+£1 p&p) When Dennis Cooper began his quintuplet of novels in 1989, of which Period is the last, he was [...]

SARAH J T LeRoy Bloomsbury, l66pp, £6.99 Sometimes, very occasionally, the story behind a book is more interesting than the story in the book. J T LeRoy's Sarah is as [...]

THE LIFE OF CELINE: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY Nicholas Hewitt Blackwell, 360pp, £45 £36 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+15% p+p) A great many incongruous images of Celine remain with one after reading this [...]

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa By Michael Finkel I read True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa after watching the movie version that came out in early 2015. The plot [...]

Harry Ricketts Chatto & Windus, 434pp, £25 Flight from the imagination Was Rudyard Kipling a modernist experimentalist or an imperialist windbag, a producer of populist rhetoric? And why does a [...]

Lady Henrietta Rous (editor) Bloomsbury, 397pp, £20 British street and fashion culture is the envy of the world. But the grind of professionalism is killing maverick talent There is a [...]

Jane Mulvagh HarperCollins, 399pp, £19.99 British street and fashion culture is the envy of the world. But the grind of professionalism is killing maverick talent There is a famous encounter [...]

Laurence O'Toole Serpent's Tail £13.99 A study of the skin trade argues for wider availability of hardcore material and takes issue with feminists Sex. What is it good for? Sexually [...]

Intellectuals are as prurient as anyone else. They are just as interested in murder, sex and disease but they don't much like to admit it. They scorn tabloids and talk [...]

'When you are in an art setting you want to appear sophisticated and broad-minded ... It's like the emperor's new clothes. You have to prove that you're unflappable.' So spoke [...]

I am nocturnal. And yet, when the winter power cuts strike and the Mac screen rolls up its eyes and slips back into primordial gloom, I know that electricity alone [...]

Any serious reader thinks they know only too well what Charles Bukowski's work will deliver. Wet rings on bar counters; the swish of the barman's dirty cloth. Rotgut whisky and [...]

Any serious reader thinks they know only too well what Charles Bukowski's work will deliver. Wet rings on bar counters; the swish of the barman's dirty cloth. Rotgut whisky and [...]

Spalding Gray and Scott Bradfield are both writers who are extremely sophisticated about fiction. They know exactly what it is and what it should do, how it should be constructed, [...]

The intricacies of the American class system can often seem mystifying, and never more so than when one contemplates the complexities of social status in the slow-moving South. Peculiar to [...]

In a bizarre return to Saturnalia, Christmas has become a time when we are overwhelmed by an avalanche of the lewd and suggestive: willy-warmers, peeing cherubs, carol-playing bog-rolls and soap [...]

A woman wearing a bizarre, conical plague mask breast feeds an eel. A masked man hammers a huge nail up his nose. A severed head is hollowed out and used [...]

Readers familiar with Derek Raymond's acclaimed 'Factory' detective novels will find that this fifth book in the series comes as no surprise. Its themes and obsessions parallel the previous novels. [...]

'Typhoid and swans,' said Dr Hannibal Lecter. 'Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.' Lecter was shaking his fist at the infinite, denying a benevolent deity. [...]

Ever since the Newgate Calendar was first issued in the 17th century, villains have been 'hung, drawn, and quartoed' to satisfy the macabre urges of the human mind. More recently, [...]

Ever since the Newgate Calendar was first issued in the 17th century, villains have been 'hung, drawn, and quartoed' to satisfy the macabre urges of the human mind. More recently, [...]

The Brat Pack writers are history. Already a younger generation of American and Canadian authors are snapping hungrily at their heels, probably figuring that it's easier to achieve fame as [...]

Daniel Richler's themes are not dissimilar, although Kicking Tomorrow (Picador, 5.99 £) is far more comic. Set in 1970s Montreal against the background of Quebecois separatism, it tells the story [...]

Spalding Gray and Scott Bradfield are both writers who are extremely sophisticated about fiction. They know exactly what it is and what it should do, how it should be constructed, [...]

The intricacies of the American class system can often seem mystifying, and never more so than when one contemplates the complexities of social status in the slow-moving South. Peculiar to [...]