From Publishers Weekly "At the start of this dark, demented fiction debut from Ellis, the creator of DC Comics' Transmetropolitan and The Authority, the U.S. president's heroin-addicted chief of staff hires 25-year-old Lower East Side PI Mike McGill to find the other Constitution. This is a secret document privately authored by several of the Founders detailing the real intent of their design for American society, which a debauched vice-president Nixon lost in the '50s."

Chapter 1 is online

Guardian> The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid has re-ignited a row about violence in detective fiction written by women.

Speaking at the Edinburgh books festival, she attacked bestselling local author Ian Rankin for suggesting that "the people writing the most graphic violence today are women ... they are mostly lesbians as well".

Great new mini-series. It sounds very generic (bank, robbers, hostages, police etc.), but it's got quite a few surprises and Mister Wahlberg is doing an excellent job.

The Kill Point Trailer

Better watch Mr. Wolf's 'Serving His Country' Monologue: Mr. Wolf and Capt. Horst Cali face to face after SWAT's unsuccessful breach.

After a series of movies about Berlin we might move to London next and this movie would be great for a friday coming up :

"London 1969 - two 'resting' (unemployed and unemployable) actors, Withnail and Marwood, fed up with damp, cold, piles of washing-up, mad drug dealers and psychotic Irishmen, decide to leave their squalid Camden flat for an idyllic holiday in the countryside, courtesy of Withnail's uncle Monty's country cottage. But when they get there, it rains non-stop, there's no food, and their basic survival skills turn out to be somewhat limited. Matters are not helped by the arrival of Uncle Monty, who shows an uncomfortably keen interest in Marwood... "

IMDB

Videos on YouTube

The Web site the meat industry does not want you to see

Mr. Ellis talk about Phil K. Dick over at the suicidegirls headquarter....

Robin Hood and His Adventures by Paul Creswick - Illustrations by N.C. Wyeth [1903]

More English Folklore over at sacred-texts.com

I never heard of this writer, but he sounds really interesting... Wikipedia: "B. S. Johnson (Bryan Stanley Johnson) (5 February 1933 - 13 November 1973) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic and film-maker. (...) Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) were relatively conventional (though the latter became famous for the cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward), but The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. (...) At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed suicide. Johnson was largely unknown to the wider reading public at the time of his death, but has a growing cult following. Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography "Like a Fiery Elephant" (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson prize) has already led to a renewal of interest in Johnson's work."

There's a a website dedicated to the works of B. S. Johnson, but his books are impossible to get. So, if you have any on your shelf, bring'em over here!

We have a new E-Mail! If you wanna write us or if you want us to put you on the mailing-list or whatever: write to info at anothercountry.de.

(The mail will be forwarded to that Google-account with the long name. This one is easier to remember.)

"Another Country is a welcoming 'culture club' owned by bearded and slightly eccentric Brit, Alan Raphaeline. Knowledgeable and always up for a chinwag, he presides over a meticulously sorted library/store of used English-language books, including a vast science fiction collection. You can borrow or buy, join the book club, come for film screenings and poetry readings, or simply hang out on the sofas."

No, we're not talking about Second Life! This is about one of those Micronations...

Wikipedia: "The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands is a micronation established as a symbolic political protest by a group of gay rights activists based in southeast Queensland Australia. It is an expression of Queer nationalism."

Official Website of the Kingdom

In "Hoffman", Sellers plays against type in a straight dramatic performance - and, to be blunt, he's brilliant. "Hoffman" was ignored at the box office upon its' release in 1970, and never got a proper US release. Even today, with a million films on VHS and DVD, you'll have a hard job finding a copy.

Read the review yourself> www.imdb.com

This will be on some friday in the future.

Our book of the week! Almost as good as "Stasiland!

"Synopsis the author's homepage:

A revealing portrait of the reunified Germany told in the form of an entertaining travelogue -- an 800-mile journey along the former Iron Curtain from the Baltic Sea to the Czech border. * In recent German history, borders -- and their expansion -- have been central to the fate of Europe. When the Iron Curtain dissolved ten years ago, the faultline that divided West and East Germany also collapsed. But could the so-called 'anti-fascist protection barrier' (or 'death strip') be erased as easily as a pencil-mark on the map? Curious to find out, Oliver August set off on an 800-mile journey from the Baltic Sea to the Czech border. * In his encounters with former border guards, ex-Stasi members turned insurance salesmen, decollectivized farmers, innkeepers, nudists, car mechanics, engine-drivers, foresters, artists and dreamers, the author reveals with a delightful lightness of touch the hopes, fears and regrets of both 'Wessis' and 'Ossis', and listens to the anxieties of those who feel 'colonized' by the West. * He travels along the Elbe, observing new nature reserves in the old borderlands; visits the unique village republic where for 22 years the inhabitants lived enclosed between two fences; watches the rebuilding of the Bismarck family castle; attends an international gathering of Trabant-owners; explores museums devoted to documenting former life along the border; travels across the dark and sinister Harz mountains which once harboured an underground Nazi concentration camp; and ends his journey in Hof, where minefields have been transformed into golf courses."

Also interesting: Inside the Red Manison (Video) - This is a short film about China's most wanted man. Lai Changxing is an illiterate peasant who cheated the Chinese government out of $3.6 billion. His story is told by Oliver August, the author of "Inside the Red Mansion," a book on the seven-year search for Mr Lai.

Photo by Siv

A very young John Cleese makes his first film appearance in The Magic Christian alongside Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.

Story by Terry Southern. Looks like a good one for some friday coming up...

IMDB: "This film takes a brilliant thrust at British notions of class and propriety, if not Western Society as a whole. Peter Sellers plays Guy Grand, a man with a perverse sense of humor, and to whom money is no object. The film begins as Grand legally adopts a young vagrant, (a monosyllabic Ringo Star), and the two set out to turn everyday life into a kind of black surreality worthy of Monty Python. Though Grand has no spoken manifesto, his overriding goal is to mock, humiliate, and freak-out his pretentious peers via elaborate practical jokes, revealing the underlying hypocrisy of polite society. Ultimately Seller's character is dismayed when his social-experiments prove his suspicions: respectable citizens will do ANYTHING for money and prestige.

This movie is not for normal people, in fact, this movie hates you. Don't watch it. Go away."

That old preview really looks kind of dorky, but the movie is great and about 90% of our regulars can't tell a wookie from a Whopper. That's why we should really have this on a friday. Oh, come on! Only to test the new sound system...! I bet I can even come up with more reasons... Or I could hold my breath....