| 1 | Best short story I’ve ever read My favourites are Ellen Gilchrist and Tobias Wolff, but I have to go for Tim O’Brien’s ‘On The Rainy River’ from ‘The Things They Carried’ as best single story. It’s the one that ends: ‘I was a coward. I went to war.’ A classic. |
| 2 | My favourite opening line of a novel: ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.’ Brighton Rock, Graham Greene. |
| 3 | Best ‘film of the book’ The Godfather parts 1 and 2 |
| 4 | My favourite novel that no-one else seems to have heard of Stanley Middleton’s Harris’s Requiem is the best novel about music I’ve read, and I’ve read a few. It’s been out of print thirty years, but is reissued by Trent Editions in 2006. I’ve just finished writing the introduction. |
| 5 | My favourite novelist that no-one else seems to have heard of I discovered Geoff Nicholson, a Sheffield born novelist now living in the US, in Ambit magazine. He writes twisted, surreal, silly, story driven, comic novels. Try Everything And More or The Knot Garden. |
| 6 | The book I’d most like to reread, if I could find it again Philip Callow’s 1956 novel The Hosanna Man was withdrawn and pulped shortly after publication because of a threatened libel action. It’s a powerful, poetic novel about young bohemians in 1950s industrial Nottingham. |
| 7 | Best long-running comic series ‘Love And Rockets’ by the Hernandez Brothers. I only arrived at issue 24, but collected the early ones on eBay. |
| 8 | My favourite bookshop My favourite bookshop: Page 45 in Nottingham specialises in comics and graphic novels. A stylish shop with great stock they know backwards. |
| 9 | Author I’d like to nominate for the Nobel Prize for literature John McGahern.
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| 10 | Deceased author I’d like to get drunk with Jane Austen. |
