Fragments

Donald Barthelme, in See the Moon?, in 1968: Fragments are the only forms I trust. Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, in 1979: …the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments…

Theo Tait on Gordon Burn

Nice, longish essay in the LRB this issue, by Theo Tait on Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday which I have written about now and again. A more unified and organised book would have excluded many of Born Yesterday’s highlights: the brilliant…

A pandemonium of fragments

Gordon Burn, in Born Yesterday, writing about the erstwhile Eastenders actress Susan Tully: A colleague had logged her onto YouTube for the first time that very afternoon, and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing…

The News as a Novel

Am reading Gordon Burns’ Born Yesterday at the moment. Burn is one of my favourite writers, whether he’s producing non-fiction such as his remarkable books about serial killers (Peter Sutcliffe in Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son; Fred and Rose West in…