Filthy English

Description

These short stories mark the start of a brilliant and black literary career. A dog who stars in bestial pornographic movies describes the slippery slope towards aniseed addiction in 'Fur and Skin'. 'The Sylvan Life' is a story of rustling, hallucinogenic mushrooms and incest as they proliferate in the New Forest. In 'Spring and Fall' a rich and childless woman offers a sybaritic young boy a clandestine family life which becomes his downfall. The most extraordinary circumstances combine to provide the perfect alibi for a homosexual 'crime passionnel' in 'Oh So Bent', 'The Brute's Price' demonstrates the inadvertent steps an innocent man may take in bringing himself under suspicion of heinous murders on Portland. An injection of the criminal element into the pretensions of suburban Surrey provides the squalid drama of 'Rhododendron Gulch'. In the title story a relentlessly pedantic urge of a lexicographer to discover why his surname is a slang word for 'foot' leads him to a nightmarish revelation. Jonathan Meades has a black imagination. Not content with disarming his readers an outrageous premise, he continues to tease their curiosity from one end of each story to the other. His is the kind of originality that comes along rarely, his characters the sort who lurk and linger round the back alleys of the mind.

Jonathan Meades is a writer, journalist, essayist and film-maker. His books include three works of fiction - Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business - and several anthologies including the recently published Museum Without Walls, which was selected as a book of the year by seven critics. He has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects such as shacks, garden cities, megastructures, buildings associated with vertigo, beer, pigs, and the architecture of Hitler and Stalin. Most recently 'Concrete Poetry', his films in praise of brutalist architectur, were shown on BBC4 in March 2014.Jonathan Meades contributed a weekly column about restaurants to The Times from 1986-2002. His memoir, An Encyclopaedia of Myself, will be published in May 2014.

'One of the funniest and truest writers we have. No one understands England better than Meades.' Stephen Fry * Praise for THE FOWLER FAMILY BUSINESS 'Jonathan Coe meets Edgar Allen Poe.' Esquire 'By the end I was appalled by the extent of my own admiration for this nastily comic tale. This comedy is not so much black as draped in sackcloth and ashes.' Bel Mooney, The Times 'Indecently funny. Few novels are as lively as this.' Christopher Bray, Mail on Sunday