I am sure that what I remember is not necessarily what actually happened, but I can only write what I remember.Wildly inventive and magnificently surreal, The Smiths: A Novella recounts the impact of an unconventional pop group from Manchester on one man's life. Taking the form of a flâneuring journey through the landscape of memory, our anonymous protagonist is accompanied by the iconic French actress Carole Bouquet, who becomes his guide and int...

A collection of specially commissioned, urban short stories edited by Ra Page to mark the launch of Comma Press.Featuring:Michael Bracewell, Shelagh Delaney, Paul Morley, Gwendoline Riley, Anthony Wilson, Gerard Woodward, Tariq Mehmood, David Constantine, Clare Pollard, Amanda Dalton, Michael Symmons Roberts, Emma Unsworth, Tony Sides, Wayne Clews and Jeanie O'Hare.The city is at once strange and strangely familiar in these stories. Friendships brea...

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist.Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent.Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when yo...

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of ou...

the first clear anatomy of a confused decade, the 1990s – ‘Bracewell, with great verve and style, animates the cultural conversation’, Greil Marcus'Michael Bracewell is the most adroitly gifted writer of his generation.' MorrisseyMichael Bracewell is now clearly established as one of the most subtle, penetrating, amusing and far-sighted of all observers of the contemporary scene in Britain. His writing on culture high and low is coveted by every broadsheet, every stylish gl...

The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of Perfect Tense is a man broken on the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine, the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of Th...

'Re-make/Re-model' tells the extraordinary and largely unknown story of the individuals and circumstances that would lead over a period of almost twenty years to the formation of Roxy Music - a group in which art, fashion and music would combine to create in the words of its inventor, Bryan Ferry, "above all, a state of mind".Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera; the fashion desig...

Roxy Music and Art-Rock Glamour is a detailed exploration of the origins of the glam scene in the early seventies. Fronted by the deeply charismatic Bryan Ferry - equal parts fifties crooner and stylish spaceman - and with the visionary Brian Eno on keyboards, Roxy Music melded high-art intentions with commercial savvy to redefine what we understand pop culture to mean, and in the course of so doing created some of the twentieth century's most adventurous music.

I am sure that what I remember is not necessarily what actually happened, but I can only write what I remember.Wildly inventive and magnificently surreal, The Smiths: A Novella recounts the impact of an unconventional pop group from Manchester on one man's life. Taking the form of a flâneuring journey through the landscape of memory, our anonymous protagonist is accompanied by the iconic French actress Carole Bouquet, who becomes his guide and int...

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist.Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent.Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when yo...

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of ou...

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have ind...