Speedboat by Renata Adler
Renata Adler’s Speedboat is an award-winning experimental novel from 1976, recently republished by New York Review Books. I, however, was readingContinue Reading
Author: scottmanleyhadley
I like to read but little else. I have bad mental health and a dog. And a baby. And no hair. And a blog.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
I’m a sentimental, emotional, man. I’m sensitive. I feel. I feel big. And Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & IncrediblyContinue Reading
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis by Will Self
I bought this for two pounds in a Walthamstow Oxfam. Definitely worth it. A tiny little picaresque novella, less thanContinue Reading
See The Old Lady Decently by B. S. Johnson
B. S. Johnson’s final novel, the first part of the never-completed Matrix Trilogy, has been out of print for decades.Continue Reading
Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins
Today I have made a fantastic discovery: if you stay sober, it is possible to read and enjoy poetry afterContinue Reading
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable
This is a brand spanking new book, given to me before its UK release by a friend with connections. Ooooh.Continue Reading
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
Hope: A Tragedy is a dark, funny novel. Hilarious, yet also quite serious, it is the narrative of the mentalContinue Reading
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
I’m going to be utterly uncharacteristic and not write a glowing review of a book. I found Rabbit, Run a bitContinue Reading
Nil Nil by Don Paterson
That’s right, more poetry. I’ve gone poetry mad. I’ve got at least two more poetry books on my shelf andContinue Reading
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Life goes on. The worst thing that can happen in a life is not the end of the world.* This,Continue Reading
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson, and more specifically his volume of interconnected short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, has had an odd history. Once considered aContinue Reading
On Seeing A Man Who Looked Just Like A Gnome.
Earlier today I passed a man who looked just like a gnome. Minus the hat. He was hatless. And hairless.Continue Reading
Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño
I made a mistake. Open. Frank. Honest. I made a mistake. Several people have told me to read Roberto Bolaño.Continue Reading
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
I will be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on poetry. That I don’t read enough poetry.Continue Reading
Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry
This book took quite a bit of searching to find. I first read about it in Jonathan Coe’s Like A FieryContinue Reading
Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant is a fun romp through the bachelor pads, newspaper boardrooms, restaurants and theatres of glamorous,Continue Reading
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Leaving the Atocha Station is a recent novel written by a young American poet who spent a year living in MadridContinue Reading
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
This is a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving novel that had me in streams of tears, laughing from the pit ofContinue Reading
On Walthamstow Market and Feeling the Best I’ve Felt In Fucking Ages
Pursuing bright green polyester with the intention of creating an amateur video effects lab, I got up and out ofContinue Reading
How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti’s brand new* How Should A Person Be? is a charming – and very contemporary – autobiographical novel detailing aContinue Reading
Maldoror and Poems by Lautréamont
Maldoror is a fucking weird book. It was written in the late 1860s by Isidore Ducasse, a young South American-bornContinue Reading
Folk Songs
A video of me performing some old songs. I’m considering gigging with my raps soon. Terrifying.
On Granta’s Best Young British Novelists 4
It’s not a book, so I shan’t provide a review as if it were one, but over the last fewContinue Reading
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
This is a beautifully crafted and elegantly written novel, a complex and intelligent exploration of ego, aging and self-fabrication. WrittenContinue Reading
On Cocaine at the Hay-on-Wye Festival
I stumbled, heady on free cheese and Spanish lager, into a temporary toilet cubicle at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, lockedContinue Reading
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer, to use a colloquialism Miller might have approved of, is a cunt’s hair from being EXACTLY myContinue Reading
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is an aggressive, brutal, novel that tears a reader through the depths of starvation, disease andContinue Reading
On The Fear That I May Be A Tragic Figure
Last night, on the way home from central London, I saw something that shook me up a little. Not somethingContinue Reading
Sad Man On A Beach
Please watch my new short film where, a la B. S. Johnson, I openly discuss the way I see theContinue Reading
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Like the fashionable urbanite I am, yet again I’ve arrived late to a party. The problem with encountering something highlyContinue Reading
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Building up towards my planned reading of Ulysses in August, I decided to try a different, shorter, Modernist classic. This was Woolf’sContinue Reading
My First eBook
Today I collated all the short stories. poems and openings to novels I wrote as an undergraduate and published themContinue Reading
A Man In Love: My Struggle Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgaard
A Death In The Family revolutionised the way I thought about literature. The honesty, the transparency, in Knausgaard’s autobiographical proseContinue Reading
Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe
I first read B. S. Johnson years after first learning of him. His (somewhat infamous) “book in a box”, The Unfortunates,Continue Reading
On Today’s Self-Indulgent Recreational Activity
I have decided, mostly as a way of procrastinating before a) sending off my first novel to agents or b)Continue Reading
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
I decided to treat the whole of 1Q84 as a single novel, rolling through from the first volume to theContinue Reading
Rap In Progress
What’s that? You’d like to understand a bit more about the way Hip-Scott writes his raps? Sure thing! Here’s aContinue Reading
On My First Wrinkle
This week I have developed, or at the very least noticed, my first wrinkle. It is above and to theContinue Reading
On Janis Joplin
I discovered the music of Janis Joplin in the late Spring of my first year of university. I’d just spentContinue Reading
On Getting Things Done
I try to wake up at seven every morning in order to, before I go to my soul-numbing job, attemptContinue Reading
On Poor Time Management
I’m meant to be meeting someone at eight. In town. Which will take me approximately thirty minutes to get to.Continue Reading
On Toys For Old Men
An old man died in the house I currently live in. Although the smell has now dissipated, what remains isContinue Reading
On Baby Aubergines, Pubic Hair and Society’s Innate Pederasty
Sorry for being quiet. I’m about a third of the way through Haruki Murakami’s 1,200-or-so page, two volume epic 1Q84,Continue Reading
Nights At The Circus By Angela Carter
At the risk of losing my hard-won feminist credentials, I’m not certain I really enjoyed this. The first hundred pagesContinue Reading
On Being Shamefully Moved By Bon Jovi
They play a radio in the office I work in. Which makes me feel like a builder. For the lastContinue Reading
On The Films of B.S. Johnson, mainly Fat Man On A Beach
I don’t feel – because I’m not – qualified to term my analysis of this collection of BS Johnson’s shortContinue Reading
On The Fear of Things I’ve Laughed Uproariously At Other People For In The Past Becoming Traits/Weaknesses I Display
It’s water in that glass. Hence the face. I’ve been drinking a lot of Port recently. This happened for threeContinue Reading
On Bleeding
Sat, supposedly insulated from the horrors of real life, writing the chorus of a hot new rap song, I noticedContinue Reading
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
This essay comes packaged with a 1940 book review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a lovely paper pamphlet. I bought itContinue Reading
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
When I drew up a list of experimental novels I felt I should read before my return to university inContinue Reading
Triumph Of The Now 