UK and US reviews

Hornby's Dream Team
From the Evening Standard 31/10/00 by Alison Roberts
The year after the publication of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby and his wife Virginia had a son called Danny, who was later diagnosed as autistic. In the introduction to this collection of new short stories, each copy of which represents a £1 donation to the trust fund for autistic children he helped set up.

Hornby describes Danny's behaviour, his severe limitations - and his progress - with a curious lack of emotion, as though one sad or bitter sentence might burst open the floodgates and overwhelm both him and us. He doesn't mind, he says, if the reader simply skips the introduction, since this is not a charity book at all. "I'm hoping that you'll feel you've done nothing charitable whatsoever," he writes. All the same, it sort of goes without saying - if you buy books at all, and you've enjoyed the work of just one of the 12 writers here, you should definitely put your hand in your pocket.

In any case, Hornby is right about the delicious menu on offer. The contributors range from the solidly reliable (Robert Harris, Helen Fielding, Roddy Doyle, Hornby himself), to the idiosyncratic (Irvine Welsh, Dave Eggers), the voguish (Zadie Smith, Melissa Bank) and the completely untried, at least at the short story (playwright Patrick Marber and actor Colin Firth, who rather bizarrely finds himself alongside the creators of Mr Darcy, aka him, and Paul Ashworth, whom he played in the film version of Fever Pitch).

They've all been restricted to telling their tales in the first person which, it turns out, isn't much of a restriction at all, since the assumed voices include those of a dead dog called Steven, a cook who prepares the last meals requested by condemned men on a spookily recognisable English death row, apparently existing in some parallel universe version of Britain; and the Prime Minister, of unspecified political colour. /.../ It's perhaps no coincidence that Marber and Firth, meanwhile, choose not adult voices, but those of a lustful (for gleaming vinyl as well as sex) adolescent and an unusually imaginative child, and thus rely heavily on an occasionally clumsy, but mostly poignant kind of nostalgia.

Fielding, by contrast, wallows in the wandering semi-consciousness of an elderly woman who, lying prone on the bathroom floor after drunkenly falling, promises God she'll behave herself in future while recollecting the date she's just enjoyed with her daughter's boyfriend. Bridget Jones aged 70, perhaps - or, better still, Bridget Jones's beloved and unreformable great-aunt. But the best, I reckon, comes right at the end. John O'Farrell's contribution, Walking into Wind is a cleverly constructed gem. /.../ Though Hornby's introductory comments are a bit bossy - "Luckily, I don't have to justify myself to you because all you've done is buy a book that you wanted to read" - he's not wrong, as it goes.

Independent on Sunday
From a review12/10/00 by Lisa Allardice
Some of the sexiest young names on both sides of the Atlantic--Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers and Melissa Bank--also make an appearance. Although he shouldn't give up his day job, the dashing Colin Firth has contributed a touching tale about a boy and his grandmother, while Hornby's "NippleJesus", narrated by a bouncer-cum-art-critic, is one of the best in this luminary collection.

Connections in the Hornby set
From The Daily Telegraph 12/02/00byMelissa Denes
And though he [Hornby] claims to lack the influence of an international rock star, he is perhaps uniquely well-connected in British literary circles - among the writers included here are Hornby's brother-in-law (Robert Harris), an old school friend (John O'Farrell) and the actor who played Hornby in Fever Pitch (Colin Firth). The collection, which consists of 12 monologues, has no organising theme but is characterised by a lightness of touch. /.../ Helen Fielding's "Lucky bitch" is good, too - a fighting monologue from "the former Grace Kelly of Hampshire", now reduced to hitting the panic button from the bathroom floor of her nursing home. /.../ Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle stick to familiar terrain, the male midlife crisis. Colin Firth, Patrick Marber and Zadie Smith all write about male adolescence, with varying degrees of success. Firth's "The Department of Nothing" strikes just the right note of boyish swagger (the narrator's parents are forever "going postal" and "mental"; his older brother is, like, "blatantly pants"). Patrick Marber's "Peter Shelley" is a sweet and authentically visceral tale about first love and first sex. Zadie Smith's account of a meeting between a boy's best friend and his older sister is disappointing.

The Daily Telegraph
From a review 09/12/00
The fashionable literary success of the moment is a new book called Speaking to the Angel, a Penguin volume of a dozen short stories by a coterie of stars that includes Zadie Smith, Colin Firth, Irvine Welsh, Robert Harris, Helen Fielding, Roddy Doyle and Patrick Marber, all friends of Nick "Fever Pitch" Hornby, who also wrote one of the stories and who put the project together.

The book has been out less than a month but the temperature is rising. Channel 4 is expected to sign a deal shortly to expand some of the stories - they are monologues really - into television films. A host of actors, comedians and directors want to climb aboard and the result is likely to be a hybrid of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads and that incestuous little film Peter's Friends in which Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Ken Branagh and Hugh Laurie relived their undergraduate days.

First, though, will be the Soho Theatre, which will stage several of the monologues in March and April. They will be performed by different stars on different nights. Marber, author of Dealer's Choice and Closer, two of the sharpest plays of the last decade, wants to direct one himself. "These are some of the best authors in Britain and the United States, writing at the top of their form. I think it's a great idea to perform the stories live and on film - they are monologues after all," says Hornby.

Speaking to the Angel is a rather remarkable project altogether. Hornby made his friends write to raise money for TreeHouse, a London school for severely autistic children. /.../ Connections made the book possible, too. Thriller writer Robert Harris, for example, is his brother-in-law, Colin Firth played the lead in the film version of Hornby's Fever Pitch, while another monologue-ist, John O'Farrell, the novelist, television scriptwriter and satirist, is an old school friend.

The monologues are eclectic. Firth, Marber and, oddly, Zadie Smith, have all written about male adolescence; Irvine Welsh's piece is about a violent hater of homosexuals condemned to rape his male friends in the afterlife; Roddy Doyle writes on midlife crisis; and Hornby's piece, Nipple Jesus, is a parable about a security man guarding a piece of dodgy modern art.

Nipple Jesus has already been performed on stage, by The Full Monty star Mark Addy at the Hammersmith launch. Harris's monologue was read by Griff Rhys-Jones. Addy is likely to be involved in either the television or stage adaptations.

Speaking with the Angel
From the Daily Mail 17/11/00. By Victoria Moore
For this collection of short stories Nick Hornby has enticed words from the pens of some of his favourtie writers: Melissa Bank, playwright Patrick Marber, Helen Fielding, Irvine Welsh and even Colin Firth (yes, Mr Darcy to you). Unusually, there is a common element to all these stories in that most of the authors employ an upfront, colloquial style. Very readable and the quality shows. Bur what you're dying to know is whether Firth's writing is as dishy as his acting. Well, yes, it's not half bad. Without the remotest trace of sentimentality, he writes about a schoolboy entranced by his dying grandmother's storytelling.

Twelve Hypnotic Stories of Salvation
A soulful anthology of first-person stories from top young authors.
Review from the Newsday website 31/01/2001 By John Freeman.
It was smart of Hornby to enlist this particular group of writers. All this talk of angels and salvation can get a little heavy. Yet, thanks to their pitch-perfect voices and their razor-sharp wits, many of these stories are hilarious. /.../

Colin Firth's ventriloquism in "The Department of Nothing" is no less deft, as he brings to life the petty superstitions of an elementary school student. This boy explains why his brother is suspiciously immature: "He just stopped playing with Pok*mon cards and you can't get much pantser than that, and weirdest of all, I found two Barbie dolls in with his action men and I think he might be doing pervy things to them."/.../

Cobbling together a collection from such leading writers is no small feat, but prompting them to move past the irony that has pervaded their previous work is perhaps a greater accomplishment. This tonal shift may stem from the fact that Hornby, whose son is autistic, will donate some of the proceeds to benefit children with autism. Kinetic, witty and, most important, soulful in unexpected ways, these stories help us transcend the mundane and look toward the heavens, smiling.

A High-Fidelity Collection from Nick Hornby
Interview with Nick Hornby by David Daley of The Hartford Courant 06/02/01
The title of the book comes from a particularly beautiful song on Ron Sexsmith's 1995 self-titled debut, which goes in part, "He in the name of love, He in the blood of the lamb/He that never lays blame, he don't even know his name/So leave him alone, set him free/'Cause he's speaking with the angel."

"I bought that album when it came out, and we didn't have the diagnosis yet," says Hornby. "It wasn't until after that when I realized what the song was all about. It always stayed in my mind as a great title if I was ever to actually do anything about it."

It was another singer - U2's Bono - who unintentionally nearly stopped the project cold. Hornby was reading an interview with Bono in The Guardian that suggested the rock star's efforts have helped reduce Third World debt by more than $100 billion. "That made me think twice," Hornby says. "He's using his influence to get rid of Third World debt. I'm trying to raise a few quid for my son's school. There's a difference in moral tone here." /.../

Hornby not only picked the contributors - which also include Colin Firth, Roddy Doyle and John O'Farrell - but set a loose theme for the writers. "What I asked for was anything written in a first-person voice that was not their own," he explains. And looking at them now, he sees some loose similarities. "They all have jokes in them, but they're also all reasonably bleak. I guess that's like me." /.../

If "Speaking With the Angel" turns American readers and Hornby's ever-trainspotting fans on to Brits like Robert Harris and Colin Firth, Marber and O'Farrell, well, great -- but raising money for TreeHouse remains Hornby's real goal. "I just want people to buy the book," he says. Gaining new fans for the writers "would be an unintended side effect - but a happy one."

Speaking with the Angel
From a review by Arthur Alexander Parker
It is fitting that these writers - ten Britons and two Americans - are contributing their work to help children caught in the isolation and mysteries of autism break out and engage the world because that is what the characters in the best stories here do: they break out of isolation in its various forms and engage the world. In this respect, perhaps, artists and autistic children have common cause.

In many of these stories, a character's world enlarges just a little bit. My favorite is Colin Firth's The Department of Nothing. A schoolboy is transfixed by the stories told by his ailing, shut-in grandmother. She is simply using her powers of invention to distract herself from the certainty that she's dying, but to the boy, the world he finds in her room is the real world, and what's outside it is "the department of nothing." The balance between fantasy and reality is nicely nuanced: the fantasy that his grandmother's false teeth are talking to him leads him through a chain of real-life events to befriend the neighborhood undertaker. What better way to come to terms with death and the transformative power of storytelling?

About a Book
Interview with Nick Hornby in New York magazine, February 2001
The most surprising thing about Speaking With the Angel (Riverhead, $12), an anthology of first-person short stories by hip, mostly British, critics' darlings, isn't that actor Colin Firth is suddenly a published writer (and, it seems, a good one), or that Dave Eggers's contribution is told from a dog's perspective. It's that the collection, culled and edited by High Fidelity author Nick Hornby, is a charity project. Hornby, however, doesn't really want you to talk about that.

Most of the authors Hornby contacted happily wrote stories, and many of those who couldn't, including J.K. Rowling, contributed money. "There was a time when I thought I wasn't even going to have to publish the damn book," Hornby says, "that I'd just get donations from rich writers and that would do it."

From a Newsday review online, February 2001:
"Colin Firth's ventriloquism in The Department of Nothing is no less deft, as he brings to life the petty superstitions of an elementary school student. This boy explains why his brother is suspiciously immature: "He just stopped playing with Pokemon cards and you can't get much pantser than that, and weirdest of all, I found two Barbie dolls in with his action men and I think he might be doing pervy things to them." /.../ Peppered with such laugh-aloud moments, Speaking with the Angel acquires the hypnotic effect of a really good monologue." Full review at the Newsday web site.

Bits and Pieces From Writers With Buzz
From a review in the New York Times 06/02/01 by Michiko Kakutani
The narrators in "Speaking With the Angel," an eclectic anthology of short stories, are a varied lot to say the least: they include a British prime minister hiding from his own security guards, a pit bull speaking from beyond the grave, an aging courtesan who's fallen in her bathroom and can't get up, a teenager having sex for the first time and a failed mime artist.

Nick Hornby, the author of the delightful novel "High Fidelity," conceived this anthology as a benefit for autistic children, and he invited some of the most talked-about new voices in fiction to contribute first- person narratives. /.../ Though the stories vary enormously in quality, they provide the reader unfamiliar with these writers with a tasting menu of their work, and longtime fans with some new morsels of fiction to debate.

Colin Firth's "Department of Nothing" touchingly depicts a young boy's efforts to escape the depressing realities of his everyday life by immersing himself in the make-believe world of his ailing grandmother's stories.

Publisher's Weekly
From a review 06/02/01
A virtual who's who of the latest literary guard, this anthology bristles with the crackly talent and confidence of both the newly and the already fabulous. Included are Hornby himself, Melissa Bank, Dave Eggers, Helen Fielding and Zadie Smith, as well as veteran favorites Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh. Every story is told in the first person, and the voices are consistent, fresh, particular. Though some tales veer toward the trendy side of topical, each one surprises and entertains. /.../ None of these 12 stories disappoints.