http://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/the-9-lives-of-ray-the-cat-jones-a-novel-by-stewart-home/

The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones: A novel by Stewart Home (Test Centre, 2014)
In June 2013 Stewart Home, an (in) famous London author/writer/performer, receives a parcel. There is no return address on it; or a name to indicate who the person who sent it is, but Home is excited for there are few who use the postal service nowadays; it must be something of value (not economic but fundamental). He unwraps it and inside is a manuscript; it is the story (auto? biography?) of Ray the Cat Jones, a notorious cat burglar who worked out of London in the 50’s and 60’s. Strange and coincidental, Home is doing research into Ray Jones, has been for a few years, for he is intrigued and fascinated by the life of this politically aware criminal (they share the same politics, both loathe the bourgeoisie, the ‘toffs’, the ‘gits’, the rich who profit because of their vicious, evil (no not evil this smacks of Christianity) exploitation of the working class) and (is this important) Ray Jones is his first cousin once removed. Home’s mother, Julia Callan (she visited Ray the Cat in prison, not often but more than once) was the daughter of Ray Jones mother’s sister (I think). Julia Callan, a one-time ‘good time’ girl who partied with Christine Keeler, (rumour has it that at some stage in the good time John F Kennedy came to London, he grooved in these circles, and nine months after he left town Julie Callan had a child, Llewellyn, born in, not sure when, but born sometime around the time that Home was born).

And so I wonder: Who speaks this novel? Who writes this novel? (continue reading…)

OBSESSED WITH A SHADOW
(Obsession: An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind; a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling. The OED 2013)
You sit at the wooden table in the top half of the house. The house is austere; the house has no shadows but your shadow is in it somewhere. There it is, a shadow as you walk under the light bulb, the only one that shines, it is a dim light and casts an insignificant glow across the cement floor, but not so insignificant as to be unimportant for as you walk underneath it there is a shadow; as you walk passed the mirror in the bathroom there is a dart, the sauntering reflection of some or other figure who you do not know, and yet you do know this personage, you will always know this shadowy somebody.
“Come close, walk next to me.” (continue reading…)

Chiuppani_Thesis_Submitted

University of Chicago

A Thesis Submitted for a Doctorate of Philosophy – 2013

Beppi Chiuppani

Turkana ST

The Sunday Times November 2013

Early morning in Nairobi “This is the rainy season,” a pilot says “difficult flying in Kenya now, Nairobi is high, 2000 feet and the weather patterns are unpredictable, but it is still early, at some point there will be a gap and when it comes, take it.”

A handful of blue, we take a right hand turn out. I hold the map on my knees and watch the green lines of the GPS. In the lull the sky is open, all around this space it is grey; the clouds are opaque and ponderous. “Storm clouds,” Tamiko says, “we will have to avoid them, how high are the peaks, we can probable only go up as 6500feet because of the cloud cover, we may have to fly around them.”
We sidestep a storm, and fly over the Nairobi suburb of Karen, named for Karen Blixen; then the Ngong Hills, the clouds are heavy around the four raised knuckles, from the ground they are benign, now they are malevolent. Below us Hog Ranch, the sometime residence of Peter Beard, khaki cloth walls hold within them many journeys. I could die in the Ngong Hills; disappear in the indifferent sky, and who would know. (continue reading…)

http://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/mandy-charlie-and-mary-jane-an-anti-novel-review/

Mandy, Charlie and Mary Jane: A Novel by
Stewart Home (Penny Ante Editions, Los Angeles, 2013)

Who reads Stewart Home? Home will say “very few, people are cowed by the malevolent society
in which we live, they believe in its values for they have no other frame of
reference, they fear it as they can think of nothing to replace it, they cannot
question it for all questioning challenges its essence.” (It is very postmodern
to say something for another; after all they may have said it, will say it or they
may not have and never will. What is verisimilitude?). But no matter here is
Stewart Home’s novel (or 245 pages of text) (continue reading…)