Review
14th January 2022
Three new books by James Kelman have just been published by PM Press of California. This must be an exciting time for both Kelman fans and for Kelman Studies. One new novel, one collection of essays, and and a philosophical debate between Kelman and Noam Chomsky -it's a lot to chew on. So The Drouth is delighted to be producing the first reviews of these new works. The second up in our Kelman series is a review of his new novel by writer Gerry Hassan.
5th January 2022
Three new books by James Kelman have just been published by PM Press of California. This must be an exciting time for both Kelman fans and for Kelman Studies. One new novel, one collection of essays, and and a philosophical debate between Kelman and Noam Chomsky -it's a lot to chew on. So The Drouth is delighted to be producing the first reviews of these new works. First up is literary critic and scholar Carole Jones with her reading of the decades long engagement between Kelman and Chomsky mapped out through this published collection of essays, interviews and correspondence between the two writers.
26th October 2021
The loss of The Arches as a site for the eruption of anarchic creative collaborations of a generation through all forms imaginable was a shock. Did the forces of conservatism conspire to finish it off in 2015... or maybe its work was done there, and the spirit needed to move on anyway? Neil Cooper's review of Innes and Bratchpiece's history of the venue is epic and elegaic: it deserves all that and even more ...
30th September 2021
The Scotto-American photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper is a titan in his field. Dana Macfarlane reviews his new show, ‘The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity’, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and discusses the tensions in the work which is 'unsettling' and 'subtly uncanny'.
1st August 2021
Form follows Fuel -or is it, Form follows Food? -Or both? In advance of COP26 -and our own specially timed 'Climate' issue in November, Florian Urban assesses Barnabas Calder's new book. Its exposé of Architecture - and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement - as the worst of climate-change culprits is interesting, to say the least, in the light of Calder's published panegyrics on Brutalism...
5th July 2021
Can climate change be discussed in isolation from racism? From slavery? Can it be discussed in isolation from anything? Johnny Rodger reviews the art work/film by Ferreira da Silva and Neuman commissioned for the Glasgow International Festival.
2nd June 2021
Ewan Gibbs' book 'Coal Country' claims to be the first full length study of deindustrialisation in the Scottish coalfields. But its scope is actually much broader and much more ambitious in its treatment of an age of massive social upheaval. Johnny Rodger reviews and appreciates that ambition.
19th May 2021
In advance of our own Neighbouring project (15-18 June @ GI), one of our Scottish Japanese collaborators, Naoko Mabon, writes here of the work of Scottish artist Ilana Halperin in Japan. Halperin's mineral investigations open us up to the urgency of our understanding of and identity with the geological in the age of Anthropocene.
US OR THEM:
Kelman’s ‘The State is Your Enemy’
Reviewed by Federica Giardino