04/08/2009

Available for over a year

In today's Strand - Thomas Pynchon, David Goldblatt, Cairo Cultural Tour, Harry Potter Rock. Thomas Pynchon Legendary and reclusive American writer Thomas Pynchon is well known for his dense and complicated novels. For his new book Inherent Vice he is trying his hand at crime writing, with a part noir, part psychedelic romp set in 1970's California. John Freeman, Acting Editor of literary magazine Granta reviews Inherent Vice for the Strand. David Goldblatt Recipient of the 2009 Henri Cartier Bresson award, South African veteran photographer David Goldblatt is also the object of a major retrospective at the New Museum in New York. An unlicensed self appointed social critic, as he once described himself, he has documented developments in South Africa through the period of Apartheid to the present. Cairo Cultural Tour Egyptian film maker Ibrahim El-Batout shows us around the downtown area of Ein Shams in Cairo. It's an insight into his personal cultural highlights of the city he grew up in that has inspired his award winning filmmaking. The Harry Potters play Wizard Rock In the United States fans of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books are buying electric guitars, synthesisers and drum kits and taking to the road to play a new kind of music: Wizard Rock or WROC. Mark meets Joe and Paul Degeorge of the band The Harry Potters to talk about wizards, Deatheaters, basilisks and why, if he hadn't been so busy fighting evil and had formed a band instead, they're convinced Harry Potter would have been a punk rocker.