Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 337

The Chaos of Copyright

A woman has had her Kindle wiped by Amazon, after they claimed a policy violation; she stands accused of is using a friend’s UK address to buy Amazon UK English Kindle books from Norway. Under Amazon’s rules, this type of action is barred, as the publisher seeks to control what content is read in which [...]

Thinking Of Visiting Russia? Please Don’t!

Two decades years after being gay was decriminalised in Russia, anti-gay legislation is making a fast comeback, with St Petersburg becoming the latest city to ban “homosexual propaganda”, and the trend set to go national.

Now a court in St Petersburg has – hilariously – summoned Madonna to appear on charges of having broken the law [...]

More Scary Shops

I think you learn more walking around the streets of a strange city than you do in its museums. I decided to plough deeper into the Barcelona backstreets today; a city ordnance prevents shops from opening on Sundays, so they built a mall on the water beyond city limits, and it’s predictably horrible, a summary [...]

The Cover That Got Me Into Trouble

When my third short story collection came out, everyone got confused. The first, ‘City Jitters’, had done well, and my US publisher asked for a second volume, so ‘More City Jitters’ appeared. By the time it was released in the UK the story lineup had somehow altered and it became ‘The Bureau of Lost Souls’. [...]

Museums Of The Peculiar

I’m in rainy, humid Barcelona this weekend, sandwiched between two odd museums, The Museum of Cannabis and the Museum of Chocolate (presumably one would visit them in that order, possibly adding the Museum of Pizza). Chocolate I can understand as it has always been seen with different purposes: as medicinal, an aphrodisiac, a nutritional food [...]

Mantel’s Magical Writing

The first book I read by Hilary Mantel was ‘Eight Months On Gaza Street’, a brilliantly disturbing account of a woman’s time in Saudi Arabia and the clash between her beliefs and those of her Arabic neighbours. It was short, tense and oddly disturbing. Her double-Booker winning Thomas Cromwell story has yet to be finished, [...]

Don’t Mention The War

Basil Fawlty did and got away with it…

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about how many good short sketches there are set in the Second World War. It seems to have provided a rich seam of laughter from Dad’s Army and Blackadder through to Armstrong & Miller playing RAF pilots speaking teen language, [...]

Best Of…No.2: London Novels

Here’s a fistful of great London novels, or rather great novels that happen to be set in London. It’s surprising how many of them have very dark subject matter, and all have a great atmosphere.

‘Our Mutual Friend’ – Charles Dickens
The obvious choice would be ‘Bleak House’, but I love this immense work almost as much, [...]

The Time Machine Book Jacket

We like to do things the Blue Peter way round at Fowler Towers, so for the cover of ‘Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared’, Strange Attractor Press’s Mark Pilkington got the excellent SF Said to photograph a little set I’d knocked up using a camera he’d been given, an old large-format Poloroid that makes [...]

Monet’s London Paintings Vanish Into The Mist

Two of Claude Monet’s London paintings, of Waterloo Bridge and of Charing Cross Bridge, are among the seven stolen in the audacious art theft from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Museum. These murky impressionist pictures are actually more intriguing the longer you look at them in the flesh, as it were, but now everyone will be looking for [...]