‘Undercurrents’ (Broken Sleep Books, 2025)
After Vade Mecum (2015) and Joiners (2019), Undercurrents is Richard Skinner’s third collection of essays. Two of the longer essays here—on the narrative triangle and on his novel The Mirror—grew out of his role as creative writing tutor at Faber Academy. Other essays appraise novels by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Praz. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Sound magazine, for whom he writes about great ‘lost’ albums, and there are four of those pieces here, plus there is a long piece about the role lyrics play in Talking Heads’ masterpiece Remain in Light. Skinner is also a regular poetry reviewer and there are reviews on books by poets Lisa Kelly, Chaucer Cameron, Peter Didsbury and Donald Davie. Finally, included here is a commissioned piece entitled “A Manifesto” written about the little-known but mind-bogglingly prolific post-techno pioneer, Muslimgauze.
Keywords: Literary criticism, film theory, comparative essay, creative journalism, life writing. Coming Summer 2025! |