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“... Until very recently I had never read any B.S. Johnson. I had a staticky reminiscence of what he might have been, which could be represented, using his own idiosyncratic conventions for marking the lapses that run through our consciousness of the world, as ‘experimental … . suicide … . wrists was it?’To clear the static first: these reprints are to celebrate what would have been the eightieth birthday of the novelist B ...”

“... B.S. Johnson died by his own hand in 1973. He was 40, and the author of seven novels, all of them rather odd in ways that put publishers off because their oddities made them expensive to produce and hard to sell. He bullied the publishers haughtily and often got his way, though at some cost to himself: the books were hard to sell ...”

“... In Like a Fiery Elephant, his recent biography of B.S. Johnson,* Jonathan Coe writes feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English at Cambridge’, he explains in the introduction, ‘imbued with a thriving, unshakeable contempt for anyone who had had the temerity to attempt the writing of literature in the last seventy or eighty years ...”

“... is even a case to be made for Giles Gordon being the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s ...”

“... it tends to make their characters pretty angry. Made to suffer cancer, Christie Malry warns B.S. Johnson that he will look stupid when they discover a cure, and anyway, ‘you shouldn’t be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it.’ Jonathan Coe drops in to tell Maxwell Sim that his book is about to end; Sim ...”

“... and necessary time-saving devices, back-scratchings and brown-nosings that other writers do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other novels … and campaign vigorously for ...”

“... hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as an advantage: the party can adopt its traditional, electorally friendly posture in defence of the sanctity of childhood – the same YouGov poll found ...”

“... act of creation. Mosley seems to intend these novels as a model of the active mind much as B.S. Johnson, in House Mother Normal, stepped off the final page and declared that the whole book was ‘a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull’. Catastrophe Practice began with a play, ‘Skylight’, set on a mountain where the ground was ‘grey ...”

“... lurking in dark corners, and now everybody’s writing about her. Since the rediscovery of B.S. Johnson (if that’s what it was) that followed Jonathan Coe’s biography a few years ago there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley ...”

“... though that doesn’t stop him going on and on about them, at enormous length). But at its best, especially in the fiction, there is a fantastic sense of energy, intellectual fearlessness, contingency, reckless dash. In 69 Things Home has a phrase he uses to describe writing that gives you that wonderful gleeful feeling, ‘the genuine pulp-writer’s ...”

“... own vision, or his own double vision. There’s a very good candle moment in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. As the pair sit down together at the Saracen’s Head in Glasgow, a moth flies into the candle between them. Johnson names the moth ‘Bozzy’ for its habit of burning its wings in the dangerous attempt to get ...”

“... with other novels, even those that are called experimental. Usually in such books – in B.S. Johnson, say, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) – the messing around with words is designed to be expressive: this page is split in half because the character is in two minds; this page is fragmented because the character ...”

“... RAF pilot stationed in Saskatchewan, he discovered a rack of American magazines in the local bus depot. They struck him, he recalled in his autobiography, Miracles of Life (2008), as having ‘huge vitality’. But he also felt that science fiction was ‘ripe for change, if not outright takeover’. Already a devotee of Freud and the Surrealists, he had ...”

“... are less and less in touch with each other. For Parrinder, this represents a betrayal of the best traditions of critical commentary. His model is the sort of literary movement (Romanticism and Modernism are obvious examples) in which ‘there was an alliance between artistic innovation and avant-garde criticism and polemic,’ an ‘intimacy between ...”

“... of Polish Jewish extraction. In 1951, Gaberbocchus published the work for which it remains best known. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is bold, cartoonish and archly slapdash, its lead couple resembling the Macbeths reimagined as Roald Dahl’s Twits. Ubu is greedy, cruel, cowardly, oafish – all the sins except lust. His wife is a randy, ambitious ...”