Picador Books – Part 9 – Matson, McCabe, McEwan, Melville, Mitchell & Morrison

Before April ends, here’s the continuation of my collection of Picador books.

The first of them tonight is Katinka Matson’s Short lives: Portraits in creativity and self-destruction

The protagonist of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is as violent as the title suggests. A chilling, brilliant novel.

Ian McEwan is a well known and highly regarded British writer. Picador published his early novels back in the 1970s.

Described as an anthology with attitude The New Gothic contains stories by Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Anne Rice among others.

Another unusual collection is Pauline Melville’s, Shape Shifter – short stories dealing with post-colonial life in the Caribbean.

Angela Carter once wrote of Adrian Mitchell that he was "a joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper, determinedly singing us away from catastrophe'’. A poet, novelist and activist he lived an interesting life and died in 2008.

Wartime was published by Picador in 1975 and the fantastic cover shows a detail from the right panel of the Triptych ‘Le Chariot de Fain’ by Jacques Bissot.

And finally for this entry, Toni Morrison’s, Beloved which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

More Picadors to follow – Flann O’Brien, John Cowper Powys etc.