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'A book about London; in other words, a book about everything' - Peter Ackroyd, "The Times". Walking the streets of London, Iain Sinclair traces nine routes across the territory of the capital. Connecting people and places, redrawing boundaries both ancient and modern, reading obscure signs and finding hidden patterns, Sinclair creates a fluid snapshot of the city. In "Lights Out for the Territory", he gives us a daring, provocative, enlightening, disturbing and utterly unique picture of modern urban life. And in the process, he reveals the dark underbelly of a London many of us did not know existed. ... Read more

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Poetry. Cultural Writing. A collection of poetry and short prose pieces from a highly prolific writer, well known for his novels and unique London travelogues, attractively produced by Etruscan Press. From the final poem, "Blue Blinds:" "how many ant shells in the programme / how much black is missing / from the spiny beach-- / by deflected tidelight smallgirl feet / feel no pain, running away." Other books by Sinclair include The Birth Rug, Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge, Jack Elam's Other Eye, The Ebbing of the Craft, and Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems 1970 - 1987. ... Read more

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"Lud Heat", a fusion of prose and verse, is an exploration of contemporary London and the historical and mythical patterns that it hides. "Suicide Bridge" is a series of texts on the mythology of place. Iain Sinclair also wrote the award-winning "Downriver". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

brian mckean not dave mckean
the illustrator of the maps is Brian Mckean, not Dave Mckean. i haven't read the book but if you arelike me and buy basically anything woth dave mckeans name on it, pass this one by.

Early work from a great original
I didn't realise this book was out of print.It seemed to be everywhere at one point! I can only say it deserves to be reprinted as soon as possible.Moorcock's introduction is a wonderful introduction to Sinclairfull of a kind of amiable contempt for most of Sinclair's less talented butgenerally more famous contemporaries.McKean has done a good job, but oneof the main points of interest in this book is that it's what Peter Ackroydacknowledges as his main influence on Hawksmoor. Profound, witty,idiosyncratic, it's a wonderful start to Sinclair! ... Read more

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An unreliable narrator, exiled on the coast, looks back on a book he may never have written. On a walk down the A13 from Aldgate Pump to Southend he acquires a package left by a missing woman - a package of stories that anticipate his quest. ... Read more

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Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, "closure." There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possessionWhat I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones... --Iain Sinclair
Continuing to photograph where his award-winning book Hackney Wick left off, Stephen Gill also made Archaeology in Reverse in this personally cherished area of East London. Still making pictures with the camera he bought at Hackney Wick market for 50 pence, for this volume Gill focuses on things that do not yet exist.
This magnificently produced book features traces and clues of things to come in a poetic, sometimes eerie and quiet photographic study of a place in a state of limbo prior to the rapid transformation that the area faces during the build-up to the Olympics in 2012. ... Read more

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Iain Sinclair is an established writer on London. In this book, he tackles the grandest and most extravagant white elephant of all time: the Millennium Dome.' ... Read more

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Iain Sinclair was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. After training at the London School of Film Technique, he published his poetry in his own Albion Village Press. His early verse shows the influence of the Beats and the Black Mountain School of poets. THE FIREWALL is a return to his small press roots, and includes a selection of 'hidden' works from 1979-2006. ... Read more

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Todd Sileen, a rage-driven cripple ekes out a living in a wasted East London borough. This is a comic and alarming epic about a city and a society shredded by random violence and uncontrollable compulsions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Calyx Of Our Dreams
What exactly this book is about I'm not at all sure that I have any plausible notion.One should certainly acquaint oneself with at least a smattering of the Whitechapel to Oxford to Cambridge geography and history before picking the book up.Also, it becomes necessary to come to know something of a (justifiably, to my mind) forgotten writer by the name of William Hope Hodgson.Further, the book is, in general, very challenging.If you aren't well-versed in many poets and writers and their most abstruse works, you will miss out on much that is of significance in this dark, meandering work.

But, aside from these ambiguous prefatory remarks, the thing that grabs the reader is Sinclair's mastery of the English language. His striking poetic descriptions are worth the rest of the occult muddle.Here are a few of these lines and passages:

"Night air hit their shamed, flushed faces like a cerebral insult.Rumours of tyre smoke and wet leaves.The smells by which Sileen navigated, the stink peculiar to this locality: a shed of maggots bred for fishermen, badly cured leather, forgotten dead things left on the hook."

"Massive ironwork gates.An agitation of leaves:ovate, deltoid, elliptic.Promiscuously mingled..."

"The curse of winter sunlight illuminating silted tributaries and overgrown paths."

"...the rusty nape of evening light."

"Their back-up, Rhab Adman, was scanning a low sky; a millrace of iron clouds, proletarian smoke, bad script, warnings.The beauty of horror chilled him.Destitute buildings with insurance-mascara windows, bricked entrances.A shifty, local moon with acid-erased features."

"Willows to the waterline.Melancholy.A lost hour between dusk and darkness.Shadows of the advancing dead."

If Sinclair's robust, poetic use of the language doesn't strike you, then I really couldn't recommend this book.It's too full of quirkiness, Brit-slang, arcana of all sorts to be appealing to most readers. - I'm not surprised at all that I'm the first to review it. - But, for what it's worth, the following passage seems to encapsulate the book's wayward theme to me:

"We are the calyx of our dreams.But are they our own?In dread, we fall victim to random nightmares.Outfalls of melancholy.We fear to close our eyes."
... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Awesome Footie Stories
Awesome collection of 25 short stories and essays about soccer. My favorites were Stephen Baxter's "Clods," Tim Pears' "Ebony International" Nicholas Lezards' "The Beautiful Game," SteveGrant's "Casuals," Geoff Nicholson's "The WinningSide," Mark Morris's "The Shirt," and Mark Timlin's"Wonder Boy." That said, almost every story has somethingworthwhile about it, and for a soccer fan, this is a must read. ... Read more