July | 2024 | Max Dunbar
1 post published by maxdunbar during July 2024| Max Dunbar
Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks appears to have had a recent makeover. Using an AI programme (I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask) you can revolve your view of the painting and see what’s going on outside the famous frame – mainly, it seems, lampposts and shadowy houses. A Washington Post writer commented on … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
When William Shatner went into outer space on Jeff Bezos’s Orbit shuttle in 2021, he became a member of a very exclusive club. After many years playing a spaceship captain Shatner was finally getting to experience space for real. Rushing to the nearest window, he didn’t feel what he had expected to feel: ‘there was … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
I love this heading. The Wells Street Journal‘s amazing artists have made this for my story of this name, available in the latest edition, ‘Dreams’. You will need to scroll to page twenty or so to get to me, but everyone’s work looks good Over at Shiny, you can also find reviews of three novels … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
It can be hard going to read a novel that has a narrator you dislike, or indeed despise. The man who narrates And He Shall Appear was such a narrator for me. This undergraduate ingenue combines naivety with a sour, affected cynicism. He’s self deprecating, but with a core of self-satisfaction. He’s interested in little inside the … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
I’ll never leave Twitter no matter how bad Elon makes it. I’m like a vampire that way – inviting me in somewhere is easy, getting me out extremely difficult. Elon will have to manually delete my account to get rid of me. Or make the site so boring that I can’t physically use it. To … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
I’ve written before that digital communication dealt a blow to conventional thriller writing. The example I used was the murder mystery set in a remote location – in the nineteenth century the villain could just cut the phone lines and plunge the other characters into isolation. These days broadband is everywhere, so the characters could … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
It seems natural that election results have to be watched all night. It’s in the night that you can feel the world turning, moving from one potential reality to the next. It could be that’s why I always stay up on every election night… also these days to prove to myself that I still can. … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
My story of this name has just been published at Erato Magazine. I’d also like to highlight my review of Francesco Dimitri’s The Dark Side of the Sky, over at Shiny – a fantastic cult novel in what has been a good year for fiction.| Max Dunbar
In late November of 2023 the law professor John Strawson visited a village named Kibbutz Kfar Azza near the Israeli-Gazan border. In this village, and elsewhere, people had been killed, raped, abducted, burned alive. Strawson wrote: There is something about hearing your own steps striking the stone walkways that adds to the physicality of the … … Continue reading →| Max Dunbar
Win or lose, it’s a national pasttime to tell the Labour Party what to do. An incoming government can expect to be weighted down with unsolicited advice and wild expectation, from pundits lik…| Max Dunbar
'Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists'| Max Dunbar
(As with the first Amis novel in this series, I am indebted to Nicholas Trigell’s The Fiction of Martin Amis, which contains an extensive chapter on Time’s Arrow.) The immediate question of Time’s …| Max Dunbar
