Faber & Faber

The private papers documenting his cosmic illumination by a pink laser have long gilded the PKD legend. Published at last, do they shed much light for the rest of us?Philip K Dick rewired my brain when I was a mere lad, after I plucked Clans of the Alphane Moon at random from a shelf in my local library. This was in the 1980s: PKD had not yet become a multi-million dollar industry and his best endorsements came from counterculture figures ...

The real people behind some noms de plume are endlessly disputed, but that's not the most interesting storyRecently I read The Orientalist by Tom Reiss, a fascinating account of the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew from Baku who after the Russian revolution escaped via Turkey to Berlin. Semi-safely ensconced in the Weimar capital, he converted to Islam, taking the name "Essad Bey". A career writing bestselling biographies of Stalin and Mohammed followed. His escapades took him as far as ...

Although he governs with despotic violence, Uzbekistan's leader reads like a platitudinous BlairiteIslam Karimov (b.1938) was appointed General Secretary of Uzbekistan's Communist party by Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1989, days after interethnic violence between Uzbeks and Meshketian Turks in the Fergana Valley had cost 200 people their lives, and a further 160,000 people their homes. Karimov immediately banned all public meetings, arguing that while all this glasnost malarkey might work well in Leningrad, it didn't suit volatile Uzbekistan. And that ...

Too many novels kit themselves out with cheap atmosphere in the form of untranslated words that everybody understands anywayIs there anything in this sorrowful world worse than books written in English where foreign words with everyday meanings appear untranslated in italics? Well yes, obviously. But that does not mean that the untranslated word is not an evil worthy of severe condemnation. You know what I am talking about. Usually you find these mots étranges sprinkled liberally through mediocre travel books ...

Authors with genuinely red-toothed experience have fascinating insights into the way the world really works to draw on. But where are they?Writers, by and large, are a boring lot – even more so now that so many are employed by the state (or states in the case of the US) to teach middle-class youth how to tell imaginary stories in prose. Yes, yes, the academy is a fascinating subject and you can't have enough tales about college politics or balding, ...

He may have lost the interest of the public, but Saddam's prose starts promisingly enough. Until the bear sexSaddam Hussein's Zabiba and the King was the first book in my library of dictator literature. I got it for Christmas 2004 – after the fall of the Ba'athist regime, but before the big man swung from the gallows. The cover reflects this: a panicked, bearded Saddam stares out at the reader, heavy bags under his eyes. Who, me torture and murder ...

Much better known for his films, his demented work in comics is truly exhilaratingOn the surface films and comics have a lot in common – most of them are juvenile crap, and there's that whole words/pictures thing too. These days adaptations between both media abound and the traditional film/comics (awesome/scum) hierarchy is breaking down. The fat guy behind Cop Out, aka Kevin Smith, dabbles in comics while Frank Miller commits aesthetic atrocities with The Spirit.But the greatest traveller between the ...

Some of his work is pretty striking, but he's hardly worthy of his current status as a god of the literary undergroundRecently I found a volume of Robert Crumb's Sketchbooks in a secondhand bookshop. Maybe I'll buy this, I thought. Then I flicked through it and after the umpteenth doodle inspired by his sexual obsession with chunky girls (this one had her hand down her pants) I decided not to bother.This was not the first time I had opted not ...

Delivered in prose of awesome sterility, the North Korean despot's commitment to lies is unwavering. Onwards!I didn't want to read Kim Jong-il's Our Socialism Centered On the Masses Shall Not Perish. I was more interested in On Film. After all, the diminutive dictator loves cinema so much he once kidnapped Shin Sang-ok – the "Orson Welles of South Korea" – and forced him to make communist kaiju movies. But the University Press of the Pacific wouldn't send me a review ...

The bleak but florid world of the travelling carnival is a potent literary sub-genre of its ownI've always been interested in the carnival or "carny" – that strange parallel world of mutants, outcasts and misfits living according to their own code. I especially like the stark contrast between the promise of wonder that hangs over the entrance to the tent, and the grim reality of door receipts, caravan life, and boredom that lurks behind it.One of the greatest carny books ...