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“... preserved, and returning.’ This observation comes not from Ulverton but from the penultimate page of Leslie Dick’s second novel, Kicking. The thematic connection seems obvious enough, but the exhumations in Dick’s book are exclusively psychological – buried memories pulled up by the root in a willed act of recollection which is triggered by a dream ...”

“... in his own way, is introducing us to his own ghosts. Two, former British war photographer Tim Page and former American grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and ...”

“... Alfred Houghton. Two years later his widow, Carrie, died leaving instructions for their daughters Kathy, Edith and Marion to be educated at Bryn Mawr College. In Kathy’s freshman year, her uncle Charlie committed suicide. This death reinforced the stigma of the earlier suicide the daughters were forced to keep secret and ...”

“... shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or may not be a biography of Kathy Acker’, by evoking the circles that gathered around her subject’s ashes in the weeks after her death from metastatic breast cancer in an alternative medicine clinic in Tijuana in November 1997. Seventeen people arrived at the house of the poet Bob ...”

“... the Necrocard, a joke organ-donor card for supporters of ‘sexual liberation’, is reproduced on page 23 of Matthew Collings’s Art Crazy Nation (2001). The volume of work is enormous, and always growing; the volume a central aspect of the challenge the work presents. It’s difficult to describe Home’s oeuvre with any real precision. It’s much easier ...”

“... contrast with Something Leather. Part of the impetus for that novel came from a suggestion made by Kathy Acker, who asked Gray if he had ever written a story with a woman as the main character. He answered: ‘No, that was impossible because I could not imagine how a woman felt when alone.’ This was a brave and candid admission. It acknowledged an inability ...”

“... thinness caused by his lack of access to the archive, to Lucca, or to X herself; the writing (‘page by page, line by line, without interruption, worthless’, Lucca says); and the many serious errors, including the most infuriating one, getting X’s birthplace wrong. The book must be discredited. But years ...”

“... explains that he’s asexual (‘We don’t have to sleep together to sleep together’) – get page after page of dialogue, rendered with an impressive command of millennialisms. ‘Bae’, adult colouring books, the ‘because’ thing (‘There were no rats in this town … Because cats’), emojis, ‘vocal ...”

“... crucially, SF writers attract not only readers but actual fans, if not of the full-blown psychotic Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery type, then at least of the autograph-hunting, book-collecting, sign-my-T-shirt kind. Indeed, as Banks explains in Raw Spirit, in one of several amusing asides about ‘British SF Fandom in the Late 20th Century, Its Customs ...”

“... and the weighty, are given equal prominence.UbuWeb is a compendious resource of everything from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa, but has no systematic collection policy, being steered only by the instincts, enthusiasms and seemingly boundless energy of Goldsmith, a poet and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, who founded it in 1996 (he is also a senior ...”

“... have given them a Benetton catalogue. Of a little over fifty pages, six are taken up with full-page pictures. On the front cover is a shot of a pretty girl. She might be a Kurd, but maybe not, the report does not say. Then there is a white girl, who could be from anywhere between Moscow and San Francisco; a black boy, probably from Africa, possibly ...”

“... half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the phrase, at this point in ...”

“... copy of the TLS. And on top of being a great observer and metaphor-maker – a poem on a magazine page ‘swimming in a little gel pack of white space’; a freshly laundered shirt emitting, when shaken, ‘the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country’ – Baker can be entertainingly fussy about vocabulary. ‘“Panties” is a word to be ...”

“... Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as recounted by the one who had experienced it. People ...”

“... This description of John’s mother showing her son the proper way to eat a Sunday lunch takes a page, and never languishes; indeed, it achieves a queasy verisimilitude. Our faces are practically in the mush: Mum gave a demonstration, and it was fascinating to watch her at work. First she mashed and moulded a tiny piece of potato onto the rounded side of ...”