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
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.
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
On Being Good God-Damn Good-Looking
I recently cut my hair. Drastically. Cut fucking loads off. And I look much better for it. (You’re goddamn right,Continue Reading
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
I thoroughly enjoyed The Bell Jar. And I realise “enjoyed” might not sound like the appropriate word… I loved Plath’sContinue Reading
State of the Nation
Nothing interests me on The Mall. And only the pelicans do in St James’s Park. But I like walking, passing,Continue Reading
On Killing Oneself in the Workplace
Sat at my desk at work, barely a minute (or at the very most two or three) goes by withoutContinue Reading
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
I found myself, as I neared the end of this, oddly, unexpectedly, moved. This novel charts Kerouac’s last year orContinue Reading
On Coaches and Trains
I’m writing this on a coach. I know. How embarrassing. I’m failing to read Kerouac by the insufficient, electric, light,Continue Reading
On The Overwhelming Sadness I Felt My Last Morning In Rome
Sat in the central courtyard, Michelangelo’s Cloister, of the National Museum of Rome, I was filled with an immense andContinue Reading
On Being Back In England
It’s cold. It’s raining. I feel ill and exhausted. And I have to go to a job in the morning.Continue Reading
Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen, the best-selling, critically lauded author of The Corrections and Freedom, also penned two other long novels before heContinue Reading
On Ancient Rome
The Roman Forum is fantastic. Eerie, elegant, a little bit scary… Despite being full of other tourists and located inContinue Reading
on euro food culture
I’m in Rome. And a bit pissed*. Earlier today I was served lunch in a small Tuscan-Umbrian border town (Chiusi)Continue Reading
On The Phrase “I Want To Pump You Full Of Spunk”
I don’t believe there is a man alive who hasn’t said, thought, heard, written or read the phrase “I wantContinue Reading
On Things That Do Impress Me (Much)
A few days ago, as part of my scathing review of Charles Mingus’ Beneath The Underdog, I mentioned that IContinue Reading
The First Rap I Ever Did
Witness the birth of Hip-Scott
On Santa Croce With No Baedeker
Rather lamely, Florence is probably the non-British city I know best. It’s full of beautiful, wonderful buildings, sculptures and paintings,Continue Reading
Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus
I used to love Charles Mingus before I read this.
On Daniel Craig as James Bond on Roofs
I was up a tower in Siena this afternoon and was gifted this beautiful view of the red-tiled roofs ofContinue Reading
On the rolling hills of Tuscany
I’m spending a short spell off Shit Island*, which is always pleasant. Even leaving it to be in a countryContinue Reading
One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
This is a very serious book. It’s a deeply realist exploration of a single day in a Soviet-era prison camp,Continue Reading
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Black Hole is a graphic novel, all about the socio-psychological repercussions of a sexually transmitted disease afflicting a bunch ofContinue Reading
Triumph Of The Now 