Dan Rhodes might be spitting feathers at the publishing industry, but he’s funny with it … ( )

Dan Rhodes has been around for a while as an author and has been hailed for his talent over the years as much as for writing on subjects that sail close to the wind. His latest book, Sour Grapes (Lightning Books), features literary and publishing types, and authors in general, who attend a book festival devised to put a small town on the map. Fans of Dan Rhodes may not be surprised that many of the characters featured do not come off particularly well, and some are less disguised than others. There is a festival organiser called Florence Peters and an author whose raison d’etre is to use the longest, most complicated words possible – his name is Wilberforce Selfram. Dan Rhodes appears himself in the book writing Sour Grapes and while it is often funny and the targets probably deserving, the whole conceit seems somewhat stretched in this format. ( )