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Showing posts from November, 2011

BOOK NEWS: Off The Record - a charity anthology

Off The Record - if the Ramones had been crime-writers Today sees the Amazon launch of the kindle version of Off The Record : thirty-eight short stories based on classic song titles. The collection sees w riters from both sides of the Atlantic coming together to produce an anthology of contemporary short stories, with all proceeds being donated to two Children's Literacy charities. In the UK it's the National Literacy Trust and in the US, Children's Literacy Initiative. My contribution to the anthology is  A New England .  The story offers a young policeman's perspective on the anti-BNP march, which took to the streets of Welling, south London in 1993, and which exposed the then government's clampdown on growing anti-fascist protests in the shadow of Stephen Lawrence's murder. Off The Record is a snapshot of the indie e-book nation at the end of a year which has seen the medium cement its place in the market. Edited by Luca Veste, writer and blogger i

INTERVIEW: Mike Hodges - 'Watching The Wheels Come Off'

Mike Hodges: "Flash saved the world! Maybe now's the right time to make the sequel?"   MIKE HODGES is best known as a film director, most notably, of the classic British crime movie  Get Carter , which he adapted memorably for the screen from Ted Lewis’s Brit-noir novel  Jack’s Return Home . He has written and directed widely for film, television, radio and theatre. His first novel,  Watching The Wheels Come Off  is a biting and bleakly satirical take on rampant self-interest and the culture it spawns, set in a fictional English seaside town. Here Hodges speaks about his own take on the novel and his inspiration for the story. He gives a no-holds barred perspective on the current state of politics and society and the attitudes of British publishers. I began by asking him what was it about the ideas behind  Watching the Wheels Come Off  that prompted him to put pen to paper for his first novel? “I’d been waiting for the finances to come together on a fil