‘McCormack brilliantly manages the pace and rhythm of each sentence, paragraph, page and sequence. The effect is to find oneself (to quote the narrator) ‘suspended in a time of stalled duration’, becalmed on the sea of memory.’

‘I’ll die at the desk. So what, where’s the coffee? Forty-five years after that first collection of stories here I go with another. Ye cannay beat that feeling man it’s beautiful. A new collection of stories! What a marvel.’ James Kelman on the writing life is a braw thing indeed.

“A new standard in post-apocalyptic fiction” – the Guardian like Anna quite a lot.

Robert Webb is taking his heartbreaking and hilarious memoir How Not To Be a Boy on tour!

“Haig is adamant that ‘one of the uses of the arts is to keep us sane’, and that ‘reading is a route out of yourself’. He is almost evangelical about the power of reading to do good. ‘I think books can save us and I think they sort of saved me,’ he says.”

Mike McCormack speaks to the Guardian: “The generation behind me seem to be much more open to the idea of experiment. I sometimes think we forget that Irish writers are experimental writers. Our Mount Rushmore is Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, and if you’re not talking about those writers then you’ve lowered your gaze. For me they’re the father, son and holy ghost. They’ve nothing in common except they all went to some trouble to expand the received form, and there’s something of that happening again – a rejuvenation of the experimental instinct.”

“Chris Cornell and Jamey Johnson will appear on a new album that sets the poems of Johnny Cash to music. Titled Johnny Cash Forever Words: The Music, the project is the brainchild of Cash’s son John Carter Cash, who confirmed the album in an email to Rolling Stone.” That’s right, John Carter Cash is making an album based on the Man in Black’s Forever Words.