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Carina Buckley, instructional design manager, Southampton Solent University, is reading Fiona Armstrong-Gibbs and Tamsin McLaren¡¯s Marketing Fashion Footwear: The Business of Shoes (Bloomsbury, 2017). ¡°We all wear shoes. Yet whereas clothes are often the subject of fashion¡¯s critical eye, the footwear industry has had by no means the same level of interest. Covering the consumer, design and construction, trade, retail and branding, this attractive and clearly laid-out book tracks the business of shoes from market research to merchandising, and fills a much-needed academic gap. Each colour-coded chapter considers a distinct area, examines ethics in action and the industry perspective, and closes with discussion questions and exercises. You don¡¯t have to be a student to find this interesting, though, just someone keen to learn more about global trade, consumer behaviour and, of course, the business of shoes.¡±

Paul Greatrix, registrar, University of Nottingham, is reading David Keenan¡¯s This Is Memorial Device (Faber & Faber, 2018). ¡°This is a very different kind of story of music, life, love and madness. It features a range of overlapping and interrelated accounts from an extraordinary cast of strange, damaged and altogether irregular characters all connected to a band, Memorial Device, that exploded into life briefly and brilliantly and then became the stuff of legend. The action and arty strangeness come from a time and a place, the West of Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s, that seem both real and remote. Far more than just a post-punk Spinal Tap pastiche ¨C although that in itself would be no bad thing ¨C this is a genuinely inventive and creative book. An extremely weird, rather dark and endlessly inventive novel, sad in some places and very funny in others, it is highly recommended.¡±

Peter J. Smith, reader in Renaissance literature, Nottingham Trent University, is reading Serge Gainsbourg¡¯s Evgu¨¦nie Sokolov (translated by John and Doreen Weightman; Tam Tam Books, 1999). ¡°This parody of a °­¨¹²Ô²õ³Ù±ô±ð°ù°ù´Ç³¾²¹²Ô, or story of an artist¡¯s development, is the first-person memoir of an uncontrollably flatulent painter who discovers that his hand moves in proportion to the force of his anal eruptions. The resulting artworks, known as ¡®gasograms¡¯, make him an overnight sensation: ¡®the critics spoke about hyper-abstractionism, stylistic emphasis, formalistic mysticism, mathematical certainty, philosophical tension, exceptional eurhythmy and hypothetico-deductive lyricism, although a few also mentioned mystification, bluff and caca¡¯. This ingenious and facetious novella is both a scatological delight and a withering attack on the art-collecting establishment, with its fancy restaurants and weekend yachts. Sokolov and Mazeppa, his farting bulldog, enfold the art world in a miasma of fetid gas, puncturing its pretensions and undermining its vaunted refinement. It¡¯s a blast!¡±