nothing in the rulebook

A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!

recent posts

about

Category: Professor Wu’s Rulebook

Opinion pieces; blog posts; articles

  • The greatest books that haven’t yet been made

    Will the revolution be digitised? For the past several years, this has been the question increasingly being asked by those in the publishing industry looking to break with the old, frustratingly risk-averse models that so often – as Julian Barnes once noted – only seem to be interested in publishing “copies of novels that are…

  • Creatives in profile: interview with Katie Arnstein

    Katie Arnstein is an actor, writer and musician from the Midlands. Her two solo shows have both won Show of the Week at VAULT Festival, with her most recent show, Sexy Lamp winning The Pick of Pleasance Award. Sexy Lamp is a show inspired by Kelly Sue DeConnick’s ‘Sexy Lamp Test’, which determines if a…

  • Book review: ‘Built on Sand’, by Paul Scraton

    Paul Scraton’s Built on Sand is described on its own cover as a novel, but those looking for a clear protagonist and a consistent story will be disappointed. They are the only ones, however. The book is challenging and demands concentration from readers, but is written beautifully; no barriers crop up as a result of…

  • Theatre review: ‘Sexy Lamp’, by Katie Arnstein

    Funny, conversational, moving and devastatingly honest, ‘Sexy Lamp’ is the new story and performance from Katie Arnstein, who previously won awards for her debut show Bicycles and Fish. The show starts as arguably too few shows do, with the solo performer Arnstein wearing a lampshade on her head, listening to Seth McFarlane’s sexist song ‘We…

  • The research is clear: we need to put down our phones and pick up our pens (and our books)

    “What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity,” so opined Henry Beston in what is a timeless meditation on the relationship between humanity and technology. Beston was writing in the late 1940s; but…

  • Book review: The Only Story, by Julian Barnes

    Paul and Susan meet at a tennis tournament, at their village sports club, when they get randomly paired together. He is “only nineteen”, is not interested in British politics at all and “dislikes and distrusts adulthood”; she is blond, in her forties, has prominent front teeth and looks beautiful in her white tennis dress. They…

  • Will Eaves’s novel ‘Murmur’ – inspired by real-life tragedy of Alan Turing – wins £30,000 literature prize

    The novelist and poet Will Eaves has won the 2019 Wellcome book prize for his fictionalised take on the chemical castration of mathematician Alan Turing. ‘Murmur’ (read our review here), published by CB Editions, was hailed as “a future classic” by judges of the £30,000 prize. It is Eaves’s fifth novel and the third published…

  • So alternative: 50 independent and alternative publishers to support, buy books from, and submit your work to

    We live in an era where the biggest publishing companies and media organisations are only concerned with stabilising profits for shareholders – and are prioritising making money over supporting originality and new creative ideas. This is strangling our modern culture – limiting us to a devastating cycle of reboots, sequels, prequels and franchises; where the…

  • Creatives in profile: interview with Sean Leahy

    Named as one of the ’50 Funniest People on Twitter’, Sean Leahy has built quite the following on the Twittershphere as @thepunningman. Appearing on Buzzfeed, Comedy Central, The Poke, Huffington Post, Funny or Die and TimeOut (among others), he has recently published his debut children’s book, The Monster Cafe via award-winning publishers Unbound.  Illustrated by Hungarian artist…

  • Navigating Ulysses: a literary map from Nabokov

    “The Joyce industry has elevated a diseased and querulous pedantry into an artform […] It is literature at its most debased.” So wrote Kevin Myers in The Telegraph in late 2001. Few books have the effect of producing a such a strong reaction upon hearing its name that Joyce’s Ulysses.  Yet the impact of Joyce’s work on modern…