Critical Mass

Stuart Kelly on What to Read Now

By Stuart Kelly

The month of June kicks off Reading the World. As part of this project, the NBCC has asked writers from around the globe to recommend a book from beyond these shores. We asked Stuart Kelly (pictured left), author of The Book of Lost Books, what book (or which writer) he had to recommend and he came back with the name of a poet.

“Frank Kuppner is perhaps the most original, entertaining and overlooked writer in Scotland. Whether it's his poetry (“A God's Breakfast”, the new collection, includes the most profound literary mugging of T S Eliot; his Selected Poems rejoice in the title “What? Again?”), his fiction (“In the Beginning there was Physics”) or his wonderful hybrids of true crime investigation, memoir and analysis of grief (“Something Very Like Murder” and “A Very Quiet Street”) he is an absolute unica; Stoic, hysterical, silly and enlightening. To quote the man himself “Better to die happily than unhappily, I suppose. / Not that it makes terribly much difference for long.”