You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The third issue of the B.S. Johnson Journal: 'The issue with the truth', featuring essays, interviews, peer-reviewed academic papers and creative pieces inspired by the British writer, with contributions from Andrew Robert Hodgson, Ed Sibley, Scott Manley Hadley, Philip Tew, Joanna Norledge, Jeremy Page, Alaska James, Richard Berry, Philip Terry, James Davies, Sue Birchenough, Ali Znaidi, Tim Chapman, Jim Goar, James Riley, Ruth Clemens, Kate Connolly, Joseph Darlington and Andy Miller
The second issue of the B.S. Johnson Journal: 'The issue with materiality', featuring essays, interviews, peer-reviewed academic papers and creative pieces inspired by the British writer, with contributions from Melanie Seddon, Romen Reyes-Peschl, David Hucklesby, Joseph Darlington, Andrew Motion, Denisa Hobbs, Michael Pennie, Richard Russell, Gemma O'Connell, Simon Dawes, Richard Leigh Harris, Hannah Van Hove, Stephanie Jones, Mark Yates"
The first issue of the B.S. Johnson Journal: 'The issue with institutions', featuring essays, interviews, peer-reviewed academic papers and creative pieces inspired by the British writer, with contributions from: Kate Connolly, Joseph Darlington, Vanessa Guignery, David Leon Higden, David Hucklesby, Juliet Jacques, Nicholas Middleton, Jeremy Page, Melanie Seddon, David Quantick.
Albert Angelo is by vocation an architect and only by economic necessity working as a substitute teacher. He had thought he was, if not dedicated, at least competent. But now, on temporary assignments in schools located in the tough neighborhoods of London, Albert feels ineffectual. He is failing as a teacher and failing to fulfill himself as an architect. And then, too, he is pained by the memory of a failed love affair.
A 36 year old that looks like Eleven from Stranger Things works in a run-down hotel on an Isle of Wight battered by austerity. Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reebok Classics come to life. Blending fiction and critical writing and anarchic joy, this is a rakish, boundary erasing work that collides literary aesthetics with working class cultures and attitudes. Interrogating autobiographical material, it extends the avant-garde tradition to make it an ally for queer migrant experience, questions dreams of national belonging, while celebrating the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.
A wild, experimental, polyphonic novel, recounting a typical day of diminishing returns at a nursing home House Mother Normal, subtitled “A Geriatric Comedy,” is the English writer B. S. Johnson’s fifth novel. Unusual in both its subject and structure, this novel is a remarkable study of old age, stripped of sentimentality and spiked with bizarre language and perceptions. Made up of eight monologues describing a single day at a nursing home, House Mother Normal explores the failing minds of the elderly with precision, humor, and unflagging compassion, and Johnson achieves, with inventiveness and escalating absurdity, a vivid multidimensional effect.
This book discusses the concept of liberature, a term coined by the Polish poet Zenon Fajfer in 1999 to refer to a kind of writing that fuses text with its material form into a conceptual whole in the space of the book. In her monograph, described by the author as "the fruit of miscegenation between a scholar and a creative writer," Katarzyna Bazarnik explains how liberature is indebted to modernist explorations of the materiality of writing pointed out by Jerome McGann, as well as practices of "presentification" described by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. She flags affinities between liberature and related concepts: N. Katherine Hayles's technotexts, Jessica Pressman's bookishness, Lori Emerson's reading-writing interfaces, and Alison Gibbons's analyses of multimodal literature. Finally, reading liberature through contemporary genre theory, she proposes to see it as a multimodal, literary genre bound to the architecture of the material book.
Christie Malry is a simple man. As a young accounts clerk at a confectionery factory in London he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping. Frustrated by the petty injustices that beset his life – particularly those caused by the behaviour of authority figures – he determines a unique way to settle his grievances: a system of moral double-entry bookkeeping. So, for every offence society commits against him, Christie exacts recompense. ‘Every Debit must have its Credit, the First Golden Rule’ of the system. All accounts are to be settled, and they are – in the most alarming way. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the last novel to be published in B S Johnson's lifetime, is undoubtedly his funniest.
Prosastykker.
With an introduction by novelist Jon McGregor. The novel describes, in the first-person, a three-week voyage aboard a deep-sea fishing trawler in the Barents Sea, not unlike the one Johnson undertook in preparation to write the book. Isolating himself from the world he knows, as well as from the ship’s crew, the narrator reflects on past events and relationships, hoping for some kind of redemption. This convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to get to the heart of the human condition is one of Johnson’s finest novels. In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B S Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Convinced that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ and that he should write about ‘nothing else but what happens to me’, Johnson produced Trawl.