Walter Benjamin's Theory of Media according to Benjamin Walker

Benjamen Walker's Theory Of Everything ran this episode on Walter Benjamin in 2006. TOE was a very creative radio show that can still be accessed on the web.His pitch is a touch post modernistic, but the argument is nonetheless to the point.

This week we take a look back at that moment when WW II was coming to a close. Hitler and Goebbels were hunkered down in the bunker reading Walter Benjamin. Serious. Give a listen.

It's useful for the way it tries to embed Walter Benjamin in the present day dynamic of "new media'.

More on Walter Benjamin

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Original audio source

The Author as Producer -- Walter Benjamin

The Author as Producer by Walter Benjamin; address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April 1934.

Walter Benjamin_ the Author as Producer

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• See post in regard to this document here: The political/personal -- Videoblogging is where it's at

Some notes on Walter Benjamin's essay -- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By Dave Riley

Walter Benjamin is for me the most accessible and the most contemporary of the Frankfurt School (very neo) Marxists.

Unlike those who he gets packaged with I think he had a lot more to say that was relevant and true.

I came at him via Bertolt Brecht, the playwright, and I appreciate the milieu that both he and Brecht worked -- Weimar Germany.

I think artistically it was one of the most creative epochs in human history. It was also a period during which art and politics merged into an easy synergy.

In terms of critical theory the main arguments in his easy - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction -- seem only now to be coming into being as his essay was predictive rather than strictly a commentary.

Benjamin read the dynamic of Industrialisation as an imperative that would in time alter all our creative endeavours by revolutionising the way -- and by whom -- "works of art" would be produced.

"An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. .. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics."

By "politics" Benjamin means the everyday social, economic and political context -- and, in that sense he is pointing out the massive potential for democratisation:

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

While Benjamin reads the dynamic of film and the 'mass media' as epitomising this potential access, it needs to be pointed out that he was writing in 1936 when the feature film and the film documentary was in its infancy.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Benjamin was also keen to explore the potency and power of the new media in this new age of Mechanical Reproduction to get at reality and explore it by a means not heretofore possible:

The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. – unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.
Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.
Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

So the means does impact on the telling so that the point of view replicated is formatted by the mechanical tools (or hardware) used to communicate with:

The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

LeftClick apologises for Vodpod

By Dave Riley

I bet you thought that I was being a touch sadistic to impose upon your bandwidth the writings of Walter Benjamin (here and here). Dense are they not?

So we'll put Benjamin aside for the moment (I'll say three Hail Marys) and come to the main problem. Unfortunately the excellent video aggregator I've been using here as well as every else where , Vodpod, has done what all web start ups aspire to do, and is now trying turn a profit.

The massive economic downturn has impacted on the corporate web big time so what now can be had for free in the Web 2.0 universe -- is likely to be more and more cost you in some (devious) way.

Thus Vodpod is now seeding its platform with adware.So if you click on a video in the panel above you get a screen equal in size to the vid dedicated to a flash generated advertisement. Not only is this obtrusive and the advertisements often sexist in nature, but Vodpod is piggy backing its advertising gnerated income grab on the productive output of those others, who created these vidoes, without their sanction. That makes me as video aggregator an agency pimp for Vodpod and I object to being forced into such a role.

So I'm going to drop the Vodpod video panel at the top of this page ASAP and find another means to share video content. Off site the LeftClickTV Channel on Vodspot is not so smothered in advertising and the page is bearable and may not get the chop.

On the web we're used to advertising -- on gmail, Yahoo groups, or whatever -- but Vodpod has gone about it with such crassness that they deserve to be cut loose. I think I won't be alone as what they've gone and done is destroyed the utility of what was a good Firefox add on.

So I'm exploring my options....

Here's a couple of experiments

Verfremdungseffekt: Mr Punch and the Moslems

Click on comic image for enlarged view

While I'm still experimenting I am trying to tackle more political themes in my webcomic  -- Mr Punch and Prof Rabaggy [Emeritus]. It isn't an easy challenge to explore but I suspect perseverance will win out.

The best thing about this exercise is that I get to manipulate in montage mode and the interfaces I  improvise are exciting to work with. A little bit of snip here and there, some copy and paste, then resizing and positioning....

It's learning a language while making up your own syntax. That I can work 'quickly' with the tools I choose to use means that I am not handicapped by  pretension. There is no best-of-all-possible images -- just the flotsam I can harvest, usually from online searches.

…An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts. …Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. — Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1981)

Years ago I read Ways of Seeing and this essay by the Marxist cultural critic, John Berger , changed my view of 'art' completely. Of course Berger draws a lot on my other fav, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 

Montage for me is the marriage of many of the possibilities flagged by Berger and Benjamin. If what we call 'art' is so readily reproduced in the digital age and shared, consciously remaking culture by recycling snippets of what is already available is  truer of our aesthetic production than we  are willing to own up to.

The other element of this I appreciate is that it locates dialogue up front and centre so that discourse gets to play out by following its own dialectical logic.

My theatre backgrund of course rules my preferences but while I'm a dedicated Brechtian I am also influenced by the perspective advocated by Keith Johnstone in regard to the process of improvisation.

“You ask me where I get my ideas? That I can’t say with any certainty. They come unbidden, directly, I could grasp them with my hands.” 

This may seem a contradictory convergence  -- although 'contradiction' is the driving force of all stuff.  When you start throwing all this  into the same pot with Dada and Constructivism..and Marxism, it has its own sweet logic. 

To me, anyway.

At least that's what I thought -- but I could never quite get my own creative juices in sync with the prospects that seem to be on offer. But when I realized the power of  comics and how comics could be created via montage methods, well, all my Christmases had come at once. 

No need to learn lines or perform. No onerous setting of the scene. No strict narrative form. No arty delusions hiding the tools used. Being both active in the panels  as performer and creator -- while   outside the process and  distanced in the Brecht sense. 

 Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect")

Self evident engagement where the value of the end result is greater than the sum of its many disparate parts.

It was also a bit of shock when I recognized that I could be 'me' (sort of) as though I was  a player in my own repertory company and co-star of my own show. (I thank the example of Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco -- and the autobiographical comics genre -- for that option.)

I could also get this 'me' to work  my own preferred  hours and do all my bidding.

Since I have a commedia dell'arte background (sort of) the logic is sweet: cartoonery characterizations performing skits (albeit in panels on a web page) in empty black space calling up anything -- any tool -- that takes their fancy.

If you do your homework on the theory of montage  you'll perhaps see the possibilities.

What I get is this great synthesis to play with and explore. But the irony is that unless you have done Improv and fiddled with photomontage you may miss the argument I'm trying to make. This isn't about the digital powers of Photoshop (which I do not use) because  I'm not striving to reproduce reality seamlessly by manipulating images to pretend that they are original or arty. It's more snip 'em and slap  'em together rather than anything else. Discordance rules and has to be seen to rule.

It's like a digital pin board and John Berger said this about them.

“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”- Ways of Seeing, John Berger

But then I could go on and on and maybe discuss Merz but then, that would be like opening up a can of worms...

---

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SLIDESHOW -- The Merzweb: Kurt Schwitters And The Inverted Web

Kurt Schwitters was eccentric even by Dadaist standards.

His collages and assemblages were erratic aggregations of found stuff pulled together in intricate ways that were never ruled by format.They weren't so much medleys of colour and shape but fleeting ideas thrown together on , initially , a flat surface. 

But by the time he got to making Merzbau -- via up-scaling --  he was creating Merz environments that like a Bower Bird, drew  their museum of Detritus from all over

Merz:...were usually collages incorporating found objects, such as bus tickets, old wire and fragments of newsprint, Merz also included artist's periodicals, sculptures, sound poems and what would later be called "installations".

While I've often wondered about the relationship between Merz and Montage (in the Soviet sense), Schwitters egocentric approach was consciously  devoid of meaning. It was a process but one without intrinsic purpose.

Here, web designer,  Dave Mee uses Schwitters  work as a template to outline a schematic overview of  the web  as a series of continuous dynamic relationships where information is ceaselessly being remade, added to and shifted about.

I think it is a brilliant outline.

• Related posts: Walter Benjamin

The Merzweb: Kurt Schwitters And The Inverted Web

View more presentations from Dave Mee.

Videoblogging:Internet TV anyone?

by Dave Riley

While I still haven't got my video camcorder back from the proverbial shop I've been shooting video on my very simple digital camera (Read DIY info).

These units are about the size of a packet of cigarettes and will fit into a breast pocket.

They shoot video as well as still and have a crude inbuilt microphone which is tolerable to record audio with.

I've shot enough 'footage' for me to open my ownRatbagMedia internet TV station. I used a great new Blogger template to remodel one of my old blogs -- Life of Riley.

So I'm off on this wonderful videoblogging journey.

New look -- for new media!

To give you an idea of how sharply creative this medium can be and how accessible its tools are, watch this short video shot on a mobile phone:

Tropfest NY 2008 winner, Mankind Is No Island by Jason van Genderen.

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I'm fascinated with the almost haiku like quality of one minute videos formatted by The Lumiere Manifesto which can be viewed here. But when you get into the medium of videoblogging you are exposed to many creative options in way of pitching something to say within the space of one to 10 minutes of recorded digital time.

I think this is important because there is a lot of poor quality advocacy passed around as video on the left. It has to be about cogent and concise content -- not video for its own sake. It's as though there's this world in front of our noses (and cameras, cell phones...) but all we can think about is trying to ape the mainstream broadcast networks as we try to capture it.

Over at Yahoo groups there's an Videoblogging discussion engine room, originally set up by Jay Dedman which is well worth monitoring because it gives you a feel for the breadth of this phenomenon. Dedman is touring/lecturing here in Australia, he tells me, in May next year.

Dedman, like a few in the vlogging milieu, are Obama Democrats -- and there's no shortage of that kind of partisanship: liberal in its outlook . His partner, Ryanne Hodson, runs a highly respected video blog too. Her post on the day of the US election, recording her polling booth experience -- Yes we did -- captures the Obama phenomenon by deploying a few very short segments shot during the day.

All this reminds me of Walter Benjamin's insightful essay on 'new media' from the POV of his outlook in the 1930s:The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Read it and consider....

VIDEO: From Eisenstien to YouTube Cinéma vérité via Marx

A Very Public Sociologist offers a informative introduction to early Soviet cinema.

Phil's post touches on the great film directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and references this sequence (below) which is the famous scene on the Odessa Steps. To my knowledge the sequence has been replicated in part a few times -- by Akira Kurosawa and Brian De Palma (The Untouchables), to name two.

The summary of Eisenstein's cinematic approach is very useful:

Eisenstein mounted his shots and joined them along various formal and thematic conflicting parameters - straight shots juxtaposed to diagonal ones, light/dark shots, and conflicts in the direction and rhythm of motion (right-to-left to left-to-right), camera distance conflicts (long shots to close-ups, etc). Through these juxtapositions of brief shots, which had a physiological effect on viewers, Eisenstein forged emotions and ideas. For him the illusion of continuity and the focus upon individual heroes encourage an anti-revolutionary false consciousness.

His most comprehensive and effective use of the conflict montage can be found in the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin.The scene consists of a dazzling series of conflicting shots and editing that powerfully convey the horror caused by Tsarist troops walking in formation down the Odessa steps while shooting and dispersing a crowd of protesters. Such cinematic attractions over thematic concerns lead the spectator in the direction desired by the director.

He then goes on to compare Dziga Vertov to Eisenstein in a descriptive summary passage:

Vertov's oeuvre was different. He believed only documentary shots of real-life situtations in revolutionary societies can the truth be revealed. He tried to follow Marx and Engels who wrote "the turning of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract art on the part of the self-consciousness, the world spirit or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quiet material, empirically verifiable act." For Vertov "we hold the ability to show and elucidate life as it is, considerably higher than the occasionally diverting doll games that people call theatre. Vertov constantly compared the fiction film to witchcraft and drugs since for him fiction was nothing but a reflection of ideologies whose function was to turn the spectator away from his awareness of the real processes of production and from truth. He therefore disliked Eisenstein's fictional recreation of events, and called for the allocation of funds to documentary rather than fictional films. In shooting, Vertov preferred the use of candid cameras in places where his presence would go unnoticed. Only in such a manner can the filmmaker make "the invisible visible, the unclear clear ...; making falsehood into truth."

This may seem to suggest that Vertov was a bit of an ideological nutter. Nonetheless, his influence has been massive and if you watch the opening (many) scenes in Man with a Movie Camera (see clip below)-- driven by a powerful musical score -- it's easy to see why.

I guess you can call this 'revolutionary cinema' on several levels -content, style, influence -- but now that we are in the YouTube age and we all can so easily become men or women with our own movie cameras (and video editing programs that are many times easier and more powerful than any thing the Soviets ever had) , what are we supposed to think about these early cinema radicals, imbued as they were with a desire to make Marxism aesthetically practical ?

This was a preoccupation for many artists in the twenties and thirties and the quest extended to Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in theatre, Kurt Weill and Dmitri Shostakovich in music -- to name but a few.

So when we come to today's digital options I wonder if we can draw any inspiration from Marx via these pioneering and so influential originators? Is the pursuit of style and form just an indulgent wank? Or is there some new conjuncture possible as we embrace the digital age online and learn to master its tools?

I think there is. Just as the 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin -- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. -- predicts the democratic potential the digital universe offers us, maybe it's time we began to think this issue through with a bit more verve than simply marveling at the creative era that was ushered in by the 1917 Russian Revolution.

What we need to do , I guess, is create our own version of Cinéma vérité even if its just for the sake of 10 minute grabs on YouTube. All we need do is develop an attitude and style that ticks all the boxes we want to tick.

What could be easier? So off you go: go shoot some cinema.


The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin

Man with a Movie Camera : Opening

Best books lists....

By Dave Riley

If you a into lists here's one that will stretch you:1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read is a recent aggregation by The Guardian. While I've tended more to read genre fiction -- as we all do tend to -- it strikes me that literary or classical novels aren't treated with the respect I learnt to defer to them.

Even novel reading per se is threatened by digital media and film.

When I left high school my aim was indeed to read 1,000 of the very best Novels Everyone Must Read or some such profound attainment. En route I got sidelined I guess and besides everyone's list keeps changing.

However, changes in educational management have downgraded such quests and I doubt that my own children --of the WWW generation --will ever muster a desire to pursue even a middling version of such a quest.

This one is nonetheless eclectic enough to relate to maybe most of us such that we can tick off what we've consumed and mentally note what we might.

My attainments are in bold.How do you fare?

Leastways we get out of this a few suggestions for next time we search the library shelves. I now keep a running record of my bookshelf on GoodReads.

That way I don't get confused between what I've read, not read and intend to...With more books published everyday and the deference to the classics faltering it's much harder to locate yourself in the "read any good books lately?" paradigm. Among a good portion of the list I'm totally lost as I've never heard of so many of these titles or many of these authors.

Nonetheless some of my favorites sneek in:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
• The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  

A favorite has to be a book you read more than once.

However there are others here I'd wish I hadn't read.

If I may, while passing, refer you to a quote from Goethe's Faust (and that's another book I've read)which used to inspire me away from solitary bookishness -- because reading aint everything you know. I learnt that early on. So I once upon a time committed this to memory -- when I had such a thing:

Is it not dust that fills my hundred shleves
And walls me in like any pedant hack
Fellow of moth and worm that delves
I drag my life through learned Bric a Brac.
But shall I here discover what I lack
And learn by reading countless volumes though
That mortals mostly live on misery's rack
That happiness is known to but a few.

The Face of Another by Kobo Abe
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Silver Stallion by Junghyo Ahn
Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington
Non-Stop by Brian W Aldiss
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
Fantomas by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler
Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Money by Martin Amis
The Information by Martin Amis
London Fields by Martin Amis
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Dom Casmurro Joaquim by Maria Machado de Assis
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
Epileptic by David B
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge
According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge
Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge
Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker
Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Balchin
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard
The Drowned World by JG Ballard
Crash by JG Ballard
Millennium People by JG Ballard
Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac
Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
La Comedie Humaine by Honore de Balzac
They Were Counted by Miklos Banffy
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
The L Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
Weaveworld by Clive Barker
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow
Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself by Henry Howarth Bashford
The Garden of the Finzi-Cortinis by Giorgio Bassani
Love for Lydia by HE Bates
Fair Stood the Wind for France by HE Bates
Carrie's War by Nina Bawden
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
Vathek by William Beckford
A Legacy by Sybille Bedford
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett
Queen Lucia by EF Benson
Trent's Last Case by EC Bentley
G by John Berger
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Lorna Doone by RD Blackmore
The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Ascent of Rum Doodle by WE Bowman
A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd
An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary E Braddon
No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon
Room at the Top by John Braine
When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs
A Dry White Season by Andre Brink
Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Look At Me by Anita Brookner
Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
Greenmantle by John Buchan
Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Coming Race by EGEL Bulwer-Lytton
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
The Asphalt Jungle by WR Burnett
Evelina by Fanny Burney
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Sound of my Voice by Ron Butlin
Possession by AS Byatt
The Virgin in the Garden by AS Byatt
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
Double Indemnity by James M Cain
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The Influence by Ramsey Campbell
The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Plague by Albert Camus
Auto-da-Fe by Elias Canetti
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Illywhacker by Peter Carey
True History of the Ned Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr
A Season in Sinji by JL Carr
The Harpole Report by JL Carr
A Month in the Country by JL Carr
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Wise Children by Angela Carter
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
The Professor's House by Willa Cather
My Antonia by Willa Cather
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
One of Ours by Willa Cather
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Monkey by Wu Ch'eng-en
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase
The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
The Man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Les Enfants Terrible by Jean Cocteau
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coeztee
The Vagabond by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Claudine a l'ecole by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Cheri by Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael G Coney
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
Victory: An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Sharpe's Eagle by Bernard Cornwell
Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell
Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
The History of Pompey the Little by Francis Coventry
Being Dead by Jim Crace
Quarantine by Jim Crace
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin
Just William by Richmal Crompton
Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Roxana by Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
The Ipcress File by Len Deighton
Bomber by Len Deighton
The Provincial Lady by EM Delafield
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R Delaney
Underworld by Don DeLillo
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter
The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter
Ratking by Michael Dibdin
Dead Lagoon by Michael Dibdin
Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin
A Rich Full Death by Michael Dibdin
Vendetta by Michael Dibdin
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Deliverance by James Dickey
Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Denis Diderot
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Camp Concentration by Thomas M Disch
Sybil or The Two Nations by Benjamin Disraeli
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow
A Fairy Tale of New York by JP Donleavy
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
USA by John Dos Passos
Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos
My New York Diary by Julie Doucet
South Wind by Norman Douglas
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie by Theodor Dreiser
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt
The Bamboo Bed by William Eastlake
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Ennui by Maria Edgeworth
Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Adam Bede by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
LA Confidential by James Ellroy
The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
A Quiet Belief in Angels by RJ Ellory
Cheese by Willem Elsschot
Silence by Shusaku Endo
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Under the Skin by Michel Faber
The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Caprice by Ronald Firbank
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Safran Foer
Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
Independence Day by Richard Ford
The African Queen by CS Forester
The Ship by CS Forester
Howards End by EM Forster
A Room with a View by EM Forster
A Passage to India by EM Forster
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Magus by John Fowles
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
Spies by Michael Frayn
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
The Beach by Alex Garland
Red Shift by Alan Garner
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Polygots by William Gerhardie
Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Immoralist by Andre Gide
The Vatican Cellars by Andre Gide
Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide
The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Odd Women by George Gissing
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
To The Ends of the Earth trilogy by William Golding
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
July's People by Nadine Gordimer
Mother by Maxim Gorky
Asterix the Gaul by Rene Goscinny
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Count Belisarius by Robert Graves
Lanark by Alastair Gray
Brewster's Millions by Richard Greaves (George Barr McCutcheon)
Living by Henry Green
Squire Haggard's Journal by Michael Green
Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene
The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
The Third Man by Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
The King of Torts by John Grisham
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman
Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon