‘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! |