So one day he decides to follow the cog along the belt and find out. He doesn’t know what the cog does, or where it goes. In it, a man in a huge, perhaps infinite factory, has for decades been pulling the same lever on the same machine on the same bit of conveyor belt to make a small cog. It went out of print for almost forty years. Glen James Brown: I’m sure many have heard of it, but a book that left a real impact on me was Smallcreep’s Day by Peter Currell Brown. What’s your favourite book no one else has heard of?

How in hell people can read in the bath I will never know. I also really like reading on the bus (back when buses were still a thing). Glen James Brown: I like reading in bed, or in a nice chair with a cup of tea.

If this mercurial quality can then be combined with amazing prose, then you might have something special.ĭescribe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). It’s that hard-to-quantify spark, same with some people you meet: they can be telling you the story of how their fridge died and they had to wait 4 days to get it fixed, so they had to eat all the stuff out of the freezer at once… and you’re just there with them, laughing your arse off. Voice is more important when sucking me into a story. Glen James Brown: Prose isn’t a primary concern when it comes to a great book. Last year, I read the Richmond Lattimore translation of The Iliad and just recently I finished Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey.Ĭan a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose? So much of our subsequent art has been inspired by them and I wanted to better understand not only artistic context, but also the texts themselves. Glen James Brown: I’ve been working my way through some of Western literature’s touchstones (Dante, Homer etc.). I’d never read Mary Gaitskill’s first collection Bad Behaviour until very recently, and that was a lot of fun.Īre there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time? Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin. Glen James Brown: Recently, there have been a few. But saying that, if I get a new book, I can just as easily read that one first.

When I want to start another book, I just pick up whichever one is vibrating closest to hand. I’m trying to read whatever books in the house I haven’t read already-some of them have been knocking about for years. Glen James Brown: Physically, nothing and I’ve got rid of the TBR pile. In the latest in this series where we ask writers about their passions, habits and dislikes, Brown tells us about his recent dedication to the classics.

The debut novel from Glen James Brown, Ironopolis (Parthian, 2018), was nominated for the Orwell Prize for political fiction as well as the 2020 Portico Prize.

Smallcreep's Day by Peter Currell Brown