01 August 08

Chapters

Chapters & Verse

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French Clicks
Robert Frank
Paris
Music buffs will know Frank’s photography from the cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1972 album, Exile on Main St. Yet the Swiss-born, US-based snapper had truly made his name decades earlier, with his gritty depiction of urban life. This book, shot when he returned to Europe in the 1950s and reissued this summer by German publisher Steidl, captures the Parisian capital just as the post-war boom was taking hold.

Child’s Play
Sebastian Fitzek
Therapy

This number-one bestseller in Germany gets an English language release. Viktor Larenz, a bereaved father convalescing on the North Sea coast, meets a schizophrenic novelist, Anna, who seems to offer some clues about the disappearance of his daughter.

Friends Reunited?
Lucy Diamond
Over You

Diamond’s latest gem follows the lives of three friends, tight in their hedonistic twenties, who meet again in London, only to find their paths have diverged, in both careers and relationships. A great look at the tougher side of growing up.

Now Playing
My Bloody Valentine
Loveless

This Anglo-Irish indie band twisted their instruments’ sounds so maniacally on their landmark 1991 album, Loveless, that they actually drafted in a flute player to reproduce some of the more piercing bursts of vocals or electric guitar when performing live

But don’t let that put you off. Lead guitarist Kevin Shields is a renowned perfectionist, and his remastered version of the album, out now, is full of swoonsome melodies and blessed-out white noise.

Travellers’ Tales
Dublin, 1914

“We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce – the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.”

JAMES JOYCE, THE DUBLINERS (1914)