Gordon Burn

In February 1994, the bodies of seven women were uncovered at the West's house, 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. As the true horror of what happened there unfolded it became clear that this was the most infamous series of murders in Britain this century.

Happy Like Murderers

Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son

Damien Hirst

Summer 2007 was an extraordinarily rich time for news. Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine MacCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow. And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into a novel about the way news is made, and the way the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us.This is a daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy. It is sure to make the headlines itself for the way it is written and for the controversial subjects he tackles. In Born Yesterday Gordon Burn creates a whole new way of writing a novel, and makes us think again about the stories we are fed by the media around us.

The News as a Novel

Born Yesterday

Alma Cogan

The Acquired Inability to Escape Inverted and Divided and Other Works

The Acquired Inability to Escape Divided

Burn bases this 1991 Whitbread Prize novel on the life of Alma Cogan, a 1950s British singer who died of cancer in 1966. In Burn's tale, Alma is still alive in 1986, and she explores the complex relationship between her public and private life. Some strong language and some violence.

A Novel

Alma

Following the 1985 final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis, Britain found itself in the grip of a new sporting obsession. Snooker, or 'Coronation Street with balls', was suddenly big business and 1986 was set to be a crucial year. In one corner was Barry Hearn and his Romford Mafia - Davis, Taylor and Griffiths - and in the other were the bad boys - Higgins, White and Knowles - threatening the game's good name, and its earning potential. For one year, Gordon Burn travelled with this snooker circus, from Hong Kong and China to out of season resorts in the North of England and the season's finale in Sheffield. With unprecedented access to the leading players and personalities involved, Pocket Money affords a unique snapshot into an extraordinary time and place.

Pocket Money

'I want it to be revealing. I'll talk about anything you like. I want it to be truthful. Let's do it. There is no off-limits. I'm afraid of nothing.' Immediately recognised as a young artist with a brilliant, sordid and uncompromising imagination, Damien Hirst is the most celebrated artist Britain has produced for generations. The undisputed leader and originator of the dominant movement in contemporary art on both sides of the Atlantic, he is now so ingrained in the public consciousness that even those with only a passing interest in art are familiar with his notorious shark and pickled sheep. Gordon Burn met Hirst for the first time nine years ago. Both admirers of David Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon and Jan Wenner's interviews with John Lennon, there was always an unspoken understanding between them that they would do something similar when the time was right. The resulting conversations in On the Way to Work are electrifyingly candid. True to the undertaking Hirst gave Burn, there is no off-limits: here are Hirst's thoughts on celebrity, money, art, alcohol, sex, death, the North of England, class, crime and cocaine; his views on Marco Pierre White, Charles Saatchi, David Bowie, Gilbert and George and Lucian Freud. More than any other individual, Damien Hirst's art and life came to define the nineties. Like the generation Hirst has come to represent, On the Way to Work is brave, unpredictable, scabrously funny and corrosively intelligent. It is also a how-to guide to becoming the most famous artist in the world.

On the Way to Work

Spanning nearly 35 years, this book is a collection of the best of Gordon Burn's writing on art. Focusing on two principle generations - the Royal College pop art of Hockney and his contemporaries, and the YBA sensations of the 1990s - it explores how these artists rose to prominence with their friends and contemporaries.

Encounters with Recent Art

Sex & Violence, Death & Silence

De beroemde Engelse zangeres blikt aan het einde van haar loopbaan terug op haar leven, waarbij allerlei beroemdheden uit de jaren vijftig de revue passeren.

Stuart Evers

'A classic.' Frank Keating, Guardian 'Unputdownable.' The Face Features a new introduction by Stuart Evers Following the 1985 final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis, Britain found itself in the grip of a new sporting obsession. Snooker, or 'Coronation Street with balls', was suddenly big business and 1986 was set to be a crucial year. In one corner was Barry Hearn and his Romford Mafia - Davis, Taylor and Griffiths - and in the other were the bad boys - Higgins, White and Knowles - threatening the game's good name, and its earning potential. For one year, Gordon Burn travelled with this snooker circus, from Hong Kong and China to out of season resorts in the North of England and the season's finale in Sheffield. With unprecedented access to the leading players and personalities involved, Pocket Money affords a unique snapshot into an extraordinary time and place.

Norman Miller used to be one of Fleet Street's finest. Now he's a middle-aged, burned-out hack with a gift for the sensational story, the shouting tabloid lead. But as he reports on a series of brutal murders and sex crimes, he's forced to wonder whether he is just a witness - or part of some deeper pattern of cause and effect . . . 'Remarkable . . . Devastating . . . Required reading for anyone interested in what British fiction should be doing today.' Stephen Amidon, Esquire

Fullalove

Peter Sutcliffe was known as the Yorkshire Ripper, the sadistic killer of thirteen women.

The Story of Peter Sutcliffe

"--Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son"

'The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more.' By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club at the age of fifteen years and eight months in 1953. Two years later he won his first England cap and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, referred to him as 'the spirit of British football'. On £15-a-week and living at Mrs Watson's boarding house at 5 Birch Avenue in Manchester, Edwards was the most prized of the Busby Babes. Then in February 1958 came Munich. Half a decade later George Best represented United reborn. 'Georgie' of the boutiques and dolly birds; 'El Beatle' of the European Cup in '68 and European Player of the Year; in the opinion of Pele, the most naturally talented footballer that ever lived. Retired at 27 and reduced to the role of Chelsea barfly and tabloid perennial; George, where did it all go wrong? An investigation into a club, two personalities and an England that has all but disappeared, Best & Edwards plots the course and trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways.

Best and Edwards

How does it feel to be never allowed to die? In his classic début novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder. Fictional characters jostle for space with real life stars - from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jnr - as Burn, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years. As beautifully written as it is disturbing, Alma Cogan remains a stingingly relevant exploration of the sad, dark underside of fame. 'An extraordinary, unprecedented novel. Audacious, innovative and totally compelling.' William Boyd

'The Pop artists were among the first to understand the desire of consumers to change their lives through the purchase of clean, manufactured commodities. YBA, on the other hand, was more interested in the dirt that accrues beneath the laminate surface of shiny things. Their special perception was that cheap language and cheap materials didn't have to equal cheap thinking. The trick was to tell it in a jaunty, unportentous, off-hand, unliterary - anti-literary - way. And then there were the drugs.' Spanning nearly 35 years, Sex & Violence, Death & Silence is a collection of the best of Gordon Burn's writing on art. Focusing on two principle generations - the Royal College pop art of Hockney and his contemporaries, and the YBA sensations of the 1990s - it explores how these artists rose to prominence with their friends and contemporaries, and what happened next. Burn's work is fast becoming a kind of chronicle. Its factuality always connects with the broader poetic rythms of cultural life. Displaying all his customary insight and empathy, his writing adds up to much more than a collection of pieces on art: superbly evocative and engaging, it offers a pathway through two of the most important and vibrant periods in recent art history, and is another compelling and ruminative look at our culture.

Encounters with recent art

Marco Livingstone

This is the first monograph on the remarkable work of British artist Richard Woods (b.1966), one of a younger generation of artists whose sculptures and installations operate on the boundary between art, architecture and design. Whatever structures he takes as his starting point - the floor of a domestic house, the walls of a gallery, the courtyard of a convent or the external walls of a public building - they are all used as flat surfaces to be embellished with paint.A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, Woods has shown extensively in Britain, continental Europe, Japan and the USA. Over the past five years, he has designed a spectacular store interior for the fashion house Comme des Garçons in Osaka and the mock Tudor refit of a private family home in upstate New York. In 2003, Import/Export Sculpture, Woods's impressively large crazy paving of a cloistered courtyard, formed the centrepiece of The Henry Moore Foundation's Stopover project at the 50th International Venice Biennale of Art.Drawing on unpublished interviews with the artist and previously unseen documentation of earlier sculptures and installations, the art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone charts the development of Woods's work since his days as an art student. The book focuses on the building-based projects completed since 2000, and many of these are further explored in extracts from an illuminating conversation between Woods and the writer and novelist Gordon Burn. The publication is lavishly illustrated, and comprises a beautifully produced record of all the artist's major works to date.

Gordon Burn

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