David Keenan Popular Books

David Keenan Biography & Facts

David Keenan (born April 1971) is a Scottish writer and author of four novels. Career He used to run the Glasgow record shop, distribution company and record label Volcanic Tongue. Journalism His work for The Wire (who he wrote for from 1996 to 2015) was highly influential, helping to focus the magazine more towards coverage of new experimental rock, noise, folk, industrial and psychedelic music. His most frequently cited article is a cover story that appeared in the August 2003 issue entitled "New Weird America", where Keenan coined the phrase "free folk", later bastardised to include "freak folk" and "wyrd folk" and used to describe everyone from Jack Rose and Charalambides through Devendra Banhart. In an August 2009 piece for The Wire, Keenan coined "hypnagogic pop" to describe a group of musicians whose work resembled "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory". His article incited a slew of hate mail that derided hypnagogic pop as the "worst genre created by a journalist". Keenan became disenchanted with the movement once it homogenized with the mainstream. A 2009 quote of Keenan cited by Karl Shaw, reproduced in his article in Wall Street Journal (Review, 24–25 Sept 2011), on The Beatles: "The Beatles are the absolute curse of modern Indie music...my favorite Beatle is Yoko Ono; without Yoko's influence, I don't think there would be any Beatles music I could listen to." Novels His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device (Faber, 2017), won the Collyer Bristow Award for Debut Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2017 Gordon Burn Prize. His second novel, For the Good Times (Faber, 2019), won the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize. Edna O'Brien described reading his third novel, Xstabeth (White Rabbit, 2020), as "feel[ing] like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music". His fourth novel, Monument Maker, was published by White Rabbit in 2021. He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse, a biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse with Wound. Bibliography This Is Memorial Device (2017) For the Good Times (2019) Xstabeth (2020) Monument Maker (2021) References External links Interview in Stylus magazine. Discover the David Keenan popular books. Find the top 100 most popular David Keenan books.

Best Seller David Keenan Books of 2024

  • The Sound of Being Human synopsis, comments

    The Sound of Being Human

    Jude Rogers

    'Too often we treat popular music as wallpaper surrounding us as we live our lives. Jude Rogers shows the emotional and cerebral heft such music can have. It's a personal journey w...

  • Music Love Drugs War synopsis, comments

    Music Love Drugs War

    Geraldine Quigley

    'A clever multiplenarrative account of teenage kicks and sectarian strife in early 80s Northern Ireland . . . this debut marks out Quigley as a writer of compassion and humour' Gua...

  • For The Good Times synopsis, comments

    For The Good Times

    David Keenan

    LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE PRIZE 2020Sammy and his three friends are country boys from Armagh, the disputed borderlands of a country cannba...

  • Monument Maker synopsis, comments

    Monument Maker

    David Keenan

    Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are so...

  • This Is Memorial Device synopsis, comments

    This Is Memorial Device

    David Keenan

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Me...