Faber & Faber

The trailer for The Hobbit has been released … Filed under: Books, Film Tagged: Fantasy, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Tolkien

Saturday’s Weekend Australian had the first part of their Best Books feature, covering contributors from A-K, and including a list of my favourite books of the year. You can read that list there, but since it was a cut-down list I thought I might do a rather more comprehensive list here (just as I did [...]

I’d never quite got the Beirut thing until I heard their new album, The Rip Tide, but I’m now officially converted. Of the many lovely tracks on the album ‘Santa Fe’ is one of the best, but it also boasts the fantastic video below, which is both very funny and a very clever exercise in [...]

I’ve not seen Oceans, the most recent documentary from Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the creators of Travelling Birds, but after seeing the two videos below I think I need to. The first is of sleeping whales, and is just luminously beautiful, while the second is of one of the strangest creatures I’ve ever seen, the [...]

Some of you may be aware of the whole vegetable vampirism thing via Terry Pratchett, others may have come across it in reviews of Matthew Beresford’s rather delightful cultural history of the vampire, From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, but if not, it’s one of those backwaters of folklore studies that [...]

Somewhere in my second novel, The Deep Field, there’s a description of an alien fossil found on Mars, and the instinctual revulsion it provokes from humans. When I wrote it I had the feeling of visceral wrongness induced by the alienness of images of insect life enlarged. The winners of this year’s Olympus Bioscapes Award, [...]

Filed under: Books, Television Tagged: Game of Thrones

A few people have been offended by the lyrics, but seriously, has mass murder ever sounded so catchy? The album’s pretty fab as well … Filed under: Music Tagged: Foster the People, Pumped Up Kicks

I’m just back from a whistlestop tour of the West Coast of the US, one of the highlights of which was a long and fascinating weekend at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego. In the way of these things it wasn’t an experience that’s really amenable to description, but I met a lot of [...]

I’ve just uploaded my review of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, which appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald to my Writing page, but if you can’t be bothered clicking through I’ve attached the text below. To sum up in a sentence, it’s brilliant: funny, addictive and ferociously intelligent, and if you haven’t read it or its [...]