Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the LRB, and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is his first original book.
'Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your
coat, and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a
modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century's worth of
adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of
genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.'
- Lucy Sante, author of The Other Paris
'This is a wonderful book, and a surprisingly encouraging one too.
Acute in its glancing survey of Fassbinder's films, it also engages
the early Seventies as a moment of ideological dishevelment that
refuses to pass. If Penman lingers over those years in his own taut
and revealing way, that is partly because they produced a kind of
critical thought that, having not yet been squared up to fit the
academic conveyor belt, could be rarified, speculative and
experimental while also remaining closely engaged with political
reality. Fassbinder is a great model for anyone puzzling over how
we might remember as well as think and act in this chaotic
time.'
- Patrick Wright, author ofThe Sea View Has Me Again
'Ian Penman - critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of
sentences like they're snakes - is the writer I have hardly gone a
week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer
without whom, etc.'
- Brian Dillon, author of Affinities
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