Song of the Silent Snow [Hardcover]

The title refers to the vibrant lives of people ignored in mainstream literature, politely shunted to one side to let the manufactured version have plenty of leg room.

These stories are about the people who populate back alleys, pool halls, slums, flats, offices and factories, the building blocks of modernity. The great mass of the general public, deemed not worthy of being led by the hand and documented into print. Literature by its very nature requires the ability to read and write, coupled with leisure time and concentration. The province of a leisured class reading about itself on a beach, aeroplane or metrolink. The last story in the collection entails the reader being grabbed and then led through a devastated emotionally scarred wasteland to enter the final doorway, a brisk walk in the countryside to ultimately find meaning and redemption.

These stories haul together the lives of the outre orbs whilst journeying into the inner psyches. They work as parables drawing on the same precepts found in philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural studies. Except Cubby makes it much more humane. These stories make the reader wince, swell, squirm and gasp with....recognition. The emotionally shut down will fall at the first fence and remain unmoved. this demarcates their psyhopathy from normalcy.

The first story deals with envy, ostracism, bullying and the psychic whirl of luck in all guises. Cleverly crafted it works on more than one throwaway. It heaves a biblical parable after the death of god has been pronounced....chance and psyche.

The second is RD Laing's elucidation, spinning a weave. destroying the highs and dragging it down, down, down. Hubert says stick to the gut reaction, enjoy the moment. Intellectualising your life will drag it all they way to the bin. It illuminates the power of no confidence in negotiating relationships, how the most seemingly innocuous pleasant events can be turned into denigration and defeat, dependings on the internal viewing.

The clowns night out, the post adolecent children knocking back the drink in exhuberant excess, becoming the meat and two veg for the officer corps to stick a fist into the salivating chin. This is the old days, the projection of hatred seething from authority to put one on the adolescent. Hubert spins the yarn as a release, juddering forward to climactic end. It is a sublime piece of work and took me back, a different time, era, culture but the same outcome, synchonicity or prescience, Hubert puts the feelings into words.

The cookie story, affirmation of the instinct, versus belief in superstition. A brilliant sharp expose how confidence wanes, ebbs and arises according to in built rituals. Meanwhile belief festers as an embodied growth in the gut. Hubert again details the worlds of emotions, kindly passed over in polite sterile literature and here makes it central.

The other stories delve into the stresses of the office salesmen communicating through violence. These are Sennet and Cobbs "The Hidden Injuries of Class" brought into the open. Selby draws emotional pictures of different expressive forms, X Rays the emotional changes in puberty, the despair of the homeless with a Kafkaesque flourish and the fetish of self sacrifice.

He produces a vision hich oozes insight, perceiving the human frame stripped of the front of pretence. Penetrating to the inner core. beyond the mask, gently guiding the viewer to inhabit a big whirl of madness. Wander the dark corridors on the inside of bad luck motel, dim yellow, fly blown lightbulbs flicker with broken mirror of recognition.

America the land of the Musicals, Friends, Fraser, pomp rock, God, Democrats, Republicans and inertia never really ingested Selby, as he held up the washing they could not get clean. These stories show why he was always on the outside. Why could he not just write something that was nice.

Hubert Selby certainly has a mania for the name Harry. In at least three of his novels, one of the main characters is named Harry. In "Last Exit in Brooklyn", there is also a supporting cast of Harrys in addition to Harry the strikebreaker. Therefore, I wasn't too surprised to discover that every short story in this collection is about a guy named Harry. Well, different guys named Harry, at least. It's fun to try and imagine that the stories are all about the same guy, but it just doesn't work, I'm sorry to report. Anyway, not as good as "Last Exit", but what is? Overall, a solid collection, with the exception of a couple snoozers, such as "The Sound", a riff on the same subject as Selby's dullest novel, "The Room" (I can't remember if that one is about a Harry or not...). Selby is such a good writer I wish that he had written more than a mere five books in thirty years of writing. But what he did write is excellent, so why complain? In other words, buy this book.

This 'drama documentary' consists of extracts from the Frankfurt trials, which interrogated ex-Nazis who presided over concentration camps. Although the blurb refers to there being no dramatic license, this is not strictly true. Weiss sharpens the witness testimony, and puts it into blank verse, making it more eloquent, stark, and remote. This is not an indictment of Weiss, of course, and the result is something so bare and straightforward that it cannot help but utterly compel its readers.