Unreal city
By: Michael Smith ; annotations and foreward by Andrew Weatherall
Contributors: Weatherall, Andrew
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2013
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 125
ISBN-13: 9780571235803
Subjects: Fiction; Social conditions
Description: With a property portfolio consisting of a beach hut in Kent, and a career as evanescent as it is unprofitable, the narrator of Unreal City is a flaneur fallen on hard times, a creative bewildered by the slick speed of the digital age, watching as the sculptors and painters and bon viveurs begin to slip away and the advertising hipsters take over old stomping grounds. From the nights in old Soho, where an anonymous green door was the gateway to a decadently dingy paradise, to the days amid the shabby post-industrial elegance of Hackney's canalside warehouses, this is a nostalgic love song to the drifters, the artists, the glamorous misfits, the degenerate waifs and the barmaid-enchantresses of the capital's backstreets and shadowy corners.
Notes: Andrew Weatherall provides a soundtrack (on CD and vinyl) for Smith’s novel, Unreal City, a work Smith describes as "a series of vignettes about London … a dysfunctional love letter to the city."

Book consists of 9 (numbered) loose signatures wrapped with a paper band and housed in a cardboard portfolio.