Will we please shut up about these books already? Yes, we will. But not before telling you one last time just how much we enjoyed Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and how much we look forward to reading Apples by Richard Milward and Submarine by Joe Dunthorne. Our enthusiasm was reaffirmed Thursday evening at Bardens Boudoir, where Milward, Dunthorne, and Ferris each read from their debut novels, as part of......

A group of men robbed a St Pancras telecommunications firm on Thursday evening by dressing up as policemen, in a plot bearing a touch of Alanis Morissette about it. The thieves were let into the building by one of the firm’s employees, after claiming to be investigating reports of people on the roof. Once inside, they ditched their pretensions to law and order and tied up five members of staff. They then made off......

Everyone who hates Banksy, move along, please. The following will rile you, and we wouldn‘t want to cause readers any undue anguish. This selection of bizarre posters is pasted on the corner of Goswell Road and Wakley Street. The one on the left seems to be an advert for a genuine magazine. The other three, all repeated throughout the neighbourhood, are at first a little more baffling. A cack-handed advert for a human blender, a......

North Kent Police are planning to plant some evidence in the near future, and are looking for suggestions as to what/who to put in the frame. To celebrate the completion of a new and very expensive police station (complete with a shopping mall and restaurants apparently)(Copper Coffee? Cop Shop? Ye Olde Bill? this could be fun) at Northfleet (which is near enough to London to make us interested), some bright spark has suggested burying......

In the UK, Joe Rogan is probably best known for playing Joe Garrelli in the sitcom NewsRadio, as a presenter on the American reality show Fear Factor, and as a commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. What us Londoners may not be aware of is that Joe is also a prolific stand-up comedian, gigging regularly to huge audiences around America for over fifteen years. He mixes traditional stand-up with political satire, a dissection of......

Camden Fringe gig #3 finds us upstairs at the Liberties Bar for our first stand-up comedy show: Paul Kerensa with "Genesis". This is his first night of 6 at the Camden Fringe before he's off up to that other place, up there. No, not heaven. Edinburgh. As you might expect this is a comedy take on the many ludicrous stories in the first book of the Old Testament whilst pulling together comedy strands that......

Has anyone else noticed the colour similarities between a recently unveiled logo and a well known fragrance for gentlemen? OK, so the green one is slightly off, but who’s to say the corresponding logo won’t evolve over the next five years or so. We don’t wish to name either party, having no desire to contravene strict rules of brand association. And we would like to stress that the organisations behind the top and bottom......

This week – rage causes a lot of trouble in 28 Weeks Later and the memoirs of Nelson Mandela’s prison guard are opened in Goodbye Bafana. In 28 Days Later the Rage virus spread throughout Britain leaving it full of dead people and those that had killed them. Now, in 28 Weeks Later, the US Army has come to restore order, repopulate the city of London and, during the same process, also reunite families. Among......

This week - The East German Stasi listen in on a writer's life (The Lives Of Others) and Disney rape our minds (Wild Hogs). First up, The Lives Of Others, a film written and directed by a man called Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film this year for that name alone. It beat Pan's Labyrinth to the prize, a film that we thought......

We've all had our run-ins with Oyster. When it works, it works well. But sometimes it sucks like a felating limpit. That's why Ben Jarvis and Tim Crook have launched badoyster, a company that makes satirical wallets for the maligned card. Commuters don’t just want pictures of kittens and butterflies on their Oyster card wallet, we think they’d much prefer something that makes them laugh and better relates to the reality of commuting on......

This week - Borat visits the USA (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) and British rom-com set on Hampstead Heath, (Scenes of a Sexual Nature). When we saw the posters for this on the tube, with five star reviews from the News of the World and the Mirror, we were ready for this to be shit. Turns out it's ok though, who'd have thought? All of the reviewers......

It's another packed weekend for those of you not already booked up for Architecture Week or otherwise engaged for the football. The schedule for this weekend's sunny Culture Crawl involves a lot of outdoor entertainment, some indoor events and as always, not a lot of money. Thursday 22 June Opening night of the Greenwich and Docklands Festival - all events are free and open air. For this event, you have to go to Woolwich......

This week, to set the pulses racing, the film world has given us a film about paedophilia (Hard Candy), a satire about the cigarette industry (Thank You For Smoking) and a movie about a bunch of chavvy wankers (The Fast and the Furious : Tokyo Drift). First up, Hard Candy. A warning to you, dear reader. Almost all of the reviews for this film reveal the end. Now, lowly as we are here at......

We're all for satire and political subversion, but this is neither of those things. This is just weird.......

Normally when we set out each week to start writing the FFN, we bring up all the broadsheet film pages and at least one movie immediately jumps out at us as being the the most interesting offering of the week. Whether it's controversial, really good, really bad or just starring Scarlett Johansson - there's usually be something to catch our eye. But not this week. This week is full to the brim with complete......

Sir Ian Blair flies out to New York to lecture on the threat of 'home-grown mass-assassins'. Delicious opportunity for satire ensues. Meanwhile, his Met minions have 'mapped' the networks of criminal gangs operating in London. Sadly, it won't be available as a Google Earth plug-in. Perhaps they used it this weekend, when 200 officers raided The Fridge in Brixton, on a drugs bust. Eleven people were arrested. Bromley continues to collapse in on itself.......

This week: V for Vendetta, Army in the Shadows and The Double Life of Veronique. Plus all the usual film rumours and Trailer of the Week. We've heard semi-promising things about the latest attempt to tranfer the genius of Alan Moore to the big screen, and after hearing David Lloyd at the Guardian Newsroom last week our hopes were up. Unfortunately we trust Peter Bradshaw quite a bit and Pete Bradshaw absolutely hates V......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. You have no idea how pleased we are this week. There is so much going on! We don't feel alone in the world anymore! London book nerds rejoice -- we've got events to attend! And with the exception of the one about work, they're really good events! (In reality, the one about work might......

This week: A Cock and Bull Story, Shopgirl, and Get Rich or Die Tryin' plus film news and gossip. Our very own reviewer has already tangled with A Cock and Bull Story but will the broadsheet reviewers agree with our positively glowing review of Michael Winterbottom's post-postmodern literary adaptation? Well, on the whole, yes they do. James Christopher in The Times is the most generous critic with a four star review, calling the film......

Sir Kenneth Branagh's recent project, as the director of Ducktastic seems to have been cursed from the beginning. And now it's closing -- its last performance is this coming Saturday. But this doesn't mean that our favourite Shakespearian is taking a break. No, plucky Kenneth stays busy, already hard at work at his new film project. And surely his new project couldn't be as misguided from the start as a satire on Siegfried and Roy......

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix... It was with these immortal words, more or less fifty years ago to this day, that the poet Allen Ginsberg first burst onto the American literary scene. The event was the ‘Six Poets at the Six’, a poetry reading held at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.......

There’s a queue, so we walk to up to the man wearing a fez who seems to be in charge of proceedings and ask if we have to buy a ticket. “No, it’s free,” he replies, handing a postcard of Kate Moss à la Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe to a passer-by, ‘like all good art should be,’ he adds gravely, giving a curt nod, the tassel on his fez jumping. We join the queue,......

Bubble opens with fresh ground being broken, but it's only when the camera pulls back that you realise it's a grave that's being dug. It's a loaded opening not only for the plot, but for what the film perhaps represents as an alternative to the mainstream (and indeed independent) movie distribution system. While the rest of Hollywood was running around like headless chickens and constantly coming up with new brain-dead ways to fight piracy......

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a brand new journal of contemporary art, poetry, prose and political satire. In fact you may already have seen it as their first issue came out in March. So why are we telling you about it now? Well, this Saturday DMCB's publishers have organised an evening of spoken word performances to celebrate their debut publication and the lineup is pretty intriguing. Sophie Woolley (pictured) is one of London's......

Slow news day? Thank God then for novelty, election-themed gnomes! The story starts at UKTV Style Gardens, the incredibly popular...erm...gardening channel. A survey by the channel recently found that 1 in 10 British homes still own a gnome, and so the brainiacs at UKTV set out to deliver a modern replacement for the traditional 'tacky' garden gnome. The result: three, specially commissioned, high specification hand-crafted gnomes of Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy.......

Well, yesterday we spelled out our feelings about the whole Ken Livingstone thing in a considered and thoughful post. So today we thought we'd go back to our roots and present to our readers a cartoon in which Ken attacks a panda while riding a mini motorbike. Now that's satire folks! (Click on the logo above to view the cartoon.)......

It's a bit tricky to figure out what to say about Nathan Barley, the new Chris Morris/Charlie Brooker sitcom which aired for the first time tonight on Channel 4. For a start, if you write for a London-based weblog, it's not entirely obvious which would make you look less like Nathan Barley - liking Nathan Barley the sitcom or hating Nathan Barley the sitcom. Londonist will hedge by saying that it's a bit of......

Maybe it will be, maybe it won't, but we're pretty sure that this is the only Doherty story this year that will involve ex-childrens TV presenter, and former inhabitant of the broom cupboard, Andi Peters. If you haven't already guessed, the Doherty-Peters connection comes courtesy of Top of the Pops which Peter produces (we've just realised that the last half of that sentence reads like a particularlry weird tongue-twister). According to reports Doherty's band......