articles, fragments, texts
Canals are wonderfully odd and fascinating places. When we "walk down to the canal", just below the surface of the city, we step away from the real into an unreal mode of irregular patterns and actions, yet, somehow, something of the real remains, represented in the red brick of the city towering above.
Wilko Johnson: 'You have to live for the minute you're in'
The Dr Feelgood guitarist talks frankly about his terminal illness. Lee Rourke meets Wilko Johnson
The Independent on Sunday
Wilko Johnson is one of the world's most famous guitarists you've never heard of. His idiosyncratic choppy playing style is credited with influencing a legion of punk guitarists. To a generation born long after punk, Wilko might be better remembered as the executioner in the TV series Game of Thrones. TV stardom or a life of rock'n'roll seems far away as he sits cross-legged on his sofa at home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.
I first came to read Ann Quin's mesmerising 'Berg' by accident in 2001. I was browsing a favourite bookshop in Brighton, looking for rare editions of Blaise Cendrars. When I asked the bookseller if he stocked anything by Cendrars he simply shook his head and held up a Calder edition of Quin's 'Berg'. "Have you ever read Ann Quin?" he asked me. "No, who's Ann Quin?" I answered.
The hazy world of Blaise Cendrars
The writer John Dos Passos called the "son of Homer" is himself a strange kind of fiction.
A legendary bookshop that isn't really there
The Guardian
You can still visit Shakespeare & Company in Paris - but the celebrated bohemian oasis no longer really exists.
Found Guilty: Anna Kavan's latest novel
The Guardian
A lost novel from the writer Anna Kavan will be published next week, and I, for one, am delighted.
The Beats gave us a plague of lazy writers
The Guardian
Like it or not, they're responsible for turning impressionable young males into seriously bad authors.
Don't mistake long novels for deep ones
The Guardian
Slim, artful volumes are so much more profound than fashionably 'epic' doorstoppers.
The Gulf war novel that still delivers urgent news
The Guardian
Noah Cicero's debut novel was a startling, fiery response to the outbreak of war in Iraq. Will it retain its power when it reaches British readers four years on?
4 tracks: Lee Rourke
4th Estaste
As part of our music-themed month on the blog, we’ve been asking our authors to talk us through four songs that have in some way shaped their writing. Lee Rourke’s selections are as innovative and forward-thinking as his novels, taking in political hip-hop, Madchester goofiness, uncompromising post-punk and minimal rock ‘n roll.
What goes into a great translation?
The Guardian
ItA new version of Kafka captures his direct manner brilliantly. But few modern authors are served so well.
What are you reading? The joys of academic books
The Guardian
Scholarly tomes can be wilfully obscure, but the better ones offer a bracing alternative to high-street slush.
Who cares about Ann Quin?
The Guardian
I do, for one, but why does no one else seem to remember this writer from the front rank of Britain's literary avant-garde?
The return of British avant garde fiction
The Guardian
Are we now ready for a new generation of experimental fiction? I certainly am.
The film that thinks it's a novel
The Guardian
Attempting to capture the image on the page is the beautiful impossibility of writing - but is this struggle better depicted on film?
Literary sex is such a turn-off
The Guardian
When writers try to make depictions of sex literary, you end up with bad sex and bad literature.
Opening a dream bookshop
The Guardian
There's a great spot open all hours in my head, but two brave souls are currently trying to get a real one going in north London.
The beautiful melancholy of Stevie Smith
The Guardian
She was renowned for her poetry, but in her novels Stevie Smith captures, with exquisite stillness and delicacy, all the pains of love.
An author of eloquent silences
The Guardian
Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes fits more into 60 pages than a shelf-full of his contemporaries' work.
The solitary voices of Fernando Pessoa
The Guardian
For all the multitudinous personalities of his writing, it is his portrait of the isolated soul that stays with me..
Endless fascination: in praise of novels without neat conclusions
The Guardian
Tidy narrative closure may be entertaining, but loose ends and ambiguity offer a truer sense of real life.
Why creative writing is better with a pen
The Guardian
Not only is longhand a much more portable way to write, it's also much more individual.
A bookshop going places
The Guardian
Although it's geared to a much easier-going kind of shopping than we're used to, the Book Barge is a genuinely dynamic enterprise.
Shelf indulgence: why it's best to build your own bookcases
The Guardian
After years of making do with shoddy shelving, the benefits of handcrafting a home for your books can't be overestimated.
Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize?
The Guardian
Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers' Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There's something a little out of the ordinary right there. It's that juxtaposition of the words "British" and "philosopher".
Time to rediscover the glory of chapbooks
The Guardian
The booklets have been spreading the literary word for more than 450 years and they still have the power to delight and inform in equal measure.
Lee Rourke's top 10 books about boredom
The Guardian
"Boredom has always fascinated me. I suppose it is the Heideggerian sense of 'profound boredom' that intrigues me the most. What he called a 'muffling fog' that swathes everything - including boredom itself - in apathy. Revealing 'being as a whole': that moment when we realise everything is truly meaningless, when everything is pared down and all we are confronted with is a prolonged, agonising nothingness.
Dialogue from a novel already written
By Lee Rourke
The Long Century
“I enjoy the silence, I guess. I like it that way, not too many families walk all the way out here, it’s too long, and when the train isn’t working, it’s near empty. That’s the best time, for me, when no one else can get here.”
Book Notes - The Canal
Largehearted Boy
I listen to a lot of music when I'm bored, alone, or doing nothing; I have done since I was a teenager. I sometimes listen to music when I'm reading, but I never listen to music when I'm writing. Not that I have to write in silence, I don't, it's just that I never think to put music on when I'm writing, and when I do it often seems forced and contrived, so I leave it alone. But, when I'm writing, or thinking about the mood of a certain scene, I think about music a lot. I create moods in my fiction by thinking of certain songs, or pieces of music.
borism
The White Review
It evolved from observing the short attention span of today’s culture, its increasing hyperactivity, shouty imagery and the pandemic boredom that sets in split-seconds after we engage with anything. Borism addresses this phenomenon by producing works that are instantly boring.
Top 5 (2009)
3AM Magazine
Exciting news: 3:AM‘s co-editor Lee Rourke has signed a deal with Melville House Publishing in New York for his novel The Canal. Home to such authors as Benoit Duteurtre, Tao Lin and Stephen Dixon, MHP are, as Lee says, “mouthwateringly independent” [you can read an interview with MHP’s Dennis Loy Johnson here]. To celebrate Lee’s news, he shares with us the last five books he recently read.
Top 5 (2010)
3AM Magazine
“As we depart from the twentieth-century insistence on literature’s powerlessness to comment on anything but literature, fables – the briefest of narratives unselfconsciously imbued with the most expansive of significations – have gained in popularity.”
Top 5 (2008)
3AM Magazine
Lee Rourke resides in London and is the author of Everyday, a collection of short stories [or “fragments” as Lee prefers to call them] described by Dazed & Confused as “an essential read for misanthropes, alcoholics and slubberdegullians.”
Top 5 (2007)
3AM Magazine
3:AM Co-Editor Lee Rourke assures us that the next Scarecrow will be up soon, a Brutalist special (what isn’t these days?), but he’s been too busy with his debut collection Everyday, out on Social Disease soon. Using his Co-Editor’s prerogative to defy convention, his Top 5 reading matter at the moment.
Top 5 (2006)
3AM Magazine
Lee Rourke started Scarecrow out of boredom one sunday night in 2004. Ennui still haunts his soul on pretty much a daily basis, though only ever-so-slightly less now. But fear not Comrades! He lives in quotidian hope, and is convinced that one day soon Blaise Cendrars will rise again and save us all.
Top 5 (2005)
3AM Magazine
Lee Rourke, editor of the cultish Scarecrow, has been listening to:
Books of the Year (2017)
3AM Magazine
THITW is a great thing; one of those ‘Experimental’ works of fiction, published by a ‘Mainstream’, ‘Traditional’ publisher that doesn’t read like an ‘Experimental’ work of fiction at all, but like a beautiful, lyrical, breathtaking work of humanist fiction, the type you find short-listed on the new ‘Experimental’ writing prizes, glowingly reviewed in the broadsheets, and stacked high on ‘3 for 2’ tables in your local High Street.
Brexit at 3AM
3AM Magazine
It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of vast public events, especially if we didn’t support them, as the majority of the UK population (‘remain’ voters + abstainers) did not. My question is one that I’ve been asked several times since Friday: what can writing do in the face of this situation?