I’d never quite got the Beirut thing until I heard their new album, The Rip Tide, but I’m now officially converted. Of the many lovely tracks on the album ‘Santa Fe’ is one of the best, but it also boasts the fantastic video below, which is both very funny and a very clever exercise in storytelling. The payoff comes late, but I promise it’s worth it …
A Family of Disguises: Michael Ondaatje's Warlight
The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide
(available in the UK for Kindle, and in Australia for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo)
Work in Progress: On Writing The Resurrectionist
Slippery Migrants: what eels do when we're not watching
Sunburnt Country review: Joelle Gergis on a fraught future with climate change
Maybe I'm Amazed: A New Appreciation for Paul McCartney
Made Things: Jeff Vandermeer's Borne
Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene
James Nestor’s Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves
The Beginning is Nigh: Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Encounters With The Uncanny: On Ghosts, Ghost Stories and Brain Science
Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
Lev Grossman's The Magician King
Susan Casey's The Wave: In Pursuit of the Ocean's Greatest Furies
Ian McDonald's The Dervish House
Summer and the Myths of Australianness
William Gibson's Zero History, Spook Country, Pattern Recognition and Distrust That Particular Flavor
Bloody beauties: the rise and rise of vampire lit
Never real and always true: on depression and creativity
The idiot box grows a brain: the rise of the new television
Perfect worlds, in miniature: stories by Annie Proulx, Robert Drewe, Michael Chabon and Anne Enright
Stealing memory's thunder: James Frey and the rise of the fake memoir
One of the easiest to listen to off the album, for sure. If you’ve never heard The Flying Cub Club, his previous release- make sure you check it out too. It’s at least as good.
YAY! I love Beirut. At last we have a musical taste in common, James.