The GDR I visited before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 was a cloud-cuckoo-land of misplaced trust. Citizens had invested their lives in socialist ideals. Whatever you think of the GDR regime, change was unavoidable. Its citizens were shafted, by Honecker, the SED elite and the Stasi. Living in Hamburg at the time, I felt driven to document the changes I was seeing. Inspired by a recent photo gallery on Der Spiegel’s website, I decided to blog my 1989 essay about the way it felt then. It’s not objective but it does capture the prevailing mood. Twenty-three years later, in the rubble left by the GFC, there are lessons for those of us who feel shafted by a form of power that differs less from the SED’s than we thought it did at the time.

Emily Perkins’ new novel The Forrests made a more noticeable impression on me than any new book I’ve read in 20 years; in fact, by the end of it I was buzzing as though I’d taken a drug. I had to go back over the last 30 pages and immediately reread them because the effect was so powerful. An interview with Perkins has been on the cards (or the books) since The Good Word became required viewing for writers and book lovers, a show that will be sorely missed when the station is closed down in June (boo!). (Photo: Patricia Phelan)

This began as a post in praise of the Kindle as a reading device. For writers the Kindle is much more than that. KDP transforms the e-reader into a publishing platform, and the most powerful device a writer has at his or her disposal. But don’t be fooled into thinking you necessarily need professional help to format your e-book. While an editor is invariably beneficial, designers and other opportunists are trying to mystify e-book formatting and cover design for profit. The paybacks of the Kindle will be self-explanatory to anyone who’s held one for longer than a minute. Writers who own a Kindle that doesn’t contain their entire body of work are either slow or have never had cause to refer to their own writing. Being able to instantly search text strings while away from your desk, look up words in the dictionary, research online via a wireless connection, highlight sections earmarked for revision and tweet quotes are just some of the more obvious benefits.

There’s already much to like about a documentary named after a Richard Brautigan poem. But after stumbling across part two of Adam Curtis’s thought-provoking if infuriating three-part film All watched over by machines of loving grace on BBC Knowledge recently, I’d have sympathised with Zoe Williams writing in the Guardian, “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote”, had I known she’d said it; even though I don’t have a dog and she was on about something else altogether. This may have been a bit of a mind-fuck for an introductory paragraph but it’s nothing compared with what Curtis almost pulls off in these films.

I love java sweet and hot. In fact, I love coffee so much that I only allow myself one cup of it a day. A big cup. A very big cup. One big cup sees me through the day and I rarely have cravings for more. One reason for this is that our Krups Bravo espresso machine is decidedly low-tech, and coffee-making tends to be far too time-consuming for an encore. It’s even more time-consuming because I use a Hario Skerton ceramic coffee mill to hand-grind the beans every morning. I like the hand-ground beans because, like an electric burr grinder, the Hario crushes the beans gently rather than pulverising them as a blade grinder does.

“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” Steve Coogan tells us about halfway through this very 21st Century road-trip. One thing this series of six half-hour TV programmes (eventually edited into a feature film) certainly isn’t about is its supposed premise: a commission from the Observer magazine for Coogan to write an article about fancy restaurants in the more picturesque parts of the England’s north country.

I don’t remember being as affected by a film since I first saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead as a teenager. The odd thing is that I haven’t even been able to watch Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void (2009) all the way through yet. It has that disturbing, captivating quality of watching someone else’s nightmare that Eraserhead made its own but the quality that had me glued to the screen was the dreamlike insistence of the imagery – and it’s isn’t even about dreams; it’s about ghosts and death.

“While cutting back the flat-leaf parsley today I discovered a South American rainforest tribe living in the vegetable patch.” Those who know me and who are familiar with my writing won’t be surprised to discover that Steve Jobs doesn’t appear in this new, previously unpublished short story. It doesn’t include his much-reported last words, either; so if you don’t know what they were, I recommend the search engine of your choice. The first ‘chapter’ follows, by way of a teaser. “Steve Jobs’ last words” is US$0.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store and if you join Amazon Prime you can borrow it for free.

This year is the 10th anniversary of SA4QE, the Slickman A4 Quotation Event, in which fans of Russell Hoban celebrate his 4 February birthday by placing quotes from his books in public places. Diana Slickman, its originator, proposed when SA4QE was established in 2002: “We each, on February 4, write our favorite passage, of any length, from any Russell Hoban book, on a piece of yellow paper and drop it somewhere public and then walk away, leaving chance to do the rest … I would recommend leaving it someplace rather than just dropping it on the ground … The paper should at least include the name of the book and Russell’s name … leaving chance to do the rest … let the mystery of things take it from there, let the paper find its way (or not) to some receptive (or not) person who would then go seek out the book (or not) and become another fan (or not)…”

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As part of an ongoing series of articles, interviews and reminiscences about and inspired by the late Jackie Leven, the following short feature by Liam Carson was written around the time Jackie was working with writer Ian Rankin on the music and spoken word project that would become Jackie Leven Said.

This picture of Jackie from the cover of a Norway-only mini-LP released in 1984, entitled ‘Some People Are Ratz’