My Favourite London Devils, Iain Sinclair
A Gazetteer of Encounters with Local Scribes, Elective Shamen & Unsponsored Keepers of the Sacred Flame. With specially commissioned illustrations by Dave McKean
Here is a delirious gathering of some of the writers, living and dead, who haunt Iain Sinclair and who inform his own London books. A party at the end of time where familiar ghosts line up to tell their overlapping stories. My Favourite London Devils is a gazetteer of influences and enthusiasms. A charge sheet. And a fragmented autobiography laid out through a series of portraits as picaresque as John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Sinclair has assembled an accidental novel in the form of a dictionary of unreliable memories, passionate critiques and interviews with the London writers he has met and admired, or recovered, secondhand, from street markets and the recommendations of wandering untenured librarians. We encounter established London authorities: Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Angela Carter. We pay our respects to the eternally rediscovered: Patrick Hamilton and Alexander Baron. And the reforgotten: Roland Camberton and Robert Westerby. Lives become books. And books become a city. The devils are out there, waiting.
These pieces were previously published in the Guardian, New Statesman, Beat Scene, London Review of Books, etc. and are gathered together for the first time.
208 pages. Full colour cover; acid-free text paper. Includes b&w versions of all sixteen specially commissioned illustrations by Dave McKean, with his 'Catacombs' image on the front cover. Printed and bound in England.
Here is a delirious gathering of some of the writers, living and dead, who haunt Iain Sinclair and who inform his own London books. A party at the end of time where familiar ghosts line up to tell their overlapping stories. My Favourite London Devils is a gazetteer of influences and enthusiasms. A charge sheet. And a fragmented autobiography laid out through a series of portraits as picaresque as John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Sinclair has assembled an accidental novel in the form of a dictionary of unreliable memories, passionate critiques and interviews with the London writers he has met and admired, or recovered, secondhand, from street markets and the recommendations of wandering untenured librarians. We encounter established London authorities: Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Angela Carter. We pay our respects to the eternally rediscovered: Patrick Hamilton and Alexander Baron. And the reforgotten: Roland Camberton and Robert Westerby. Lives become books. And books become a city. The devils are out there, waiting.
These pieces were previously published in the Guardian, New Statesman, Beat Scene, London Review of Books, etc. and are gathered together for the first time.
208 pages. Full colour cover; acid-free text paper. Includes b&w versions of all sixteen specially commissioned illustrations by Dave McKean, with his 'Catacombs' image on the front cover. Printed and bound in England.
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