thu 06/11/2025

book reviews and features

Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'

theartsdesk

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in...

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Nicole Krauss: To Be a Man review - first short-story collection from the award-winning novelist

Markie Robson-Scott

Tamar, a character in “The Husband”, one of the most appealing, joyful stories in Nicole Krauss’s new collection...

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Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

India Lewis

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,...

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Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois

theartsdesk

How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to...

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Ben Wilson: Metropolis - A History of Humankind's Greatest Invention review - urban resilience throughout the ages

Daniel Lewis

Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived...

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Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology review - wild writing to stimulate the senses

Daniel Lewis

Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes...

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Judith Herrin: Ravenna review - flashes of order and beauty in a chaotic world

David Nice

Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the...

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Jenny Hval: Girls Against God review - a sticky dance through space and time

India Lewis

Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy...

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10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás

Jessica Payn

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "...

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The Secret History of My Library: Essay by Daniel Saldaña París

Daniel Saldaña Paris

Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible...

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Palestine 36 review - memories of a nation

“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically...

The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera - pointless feminist compli...

Janáček described his nature-versus-humanity fable The Cunning Little Vixen as “a merry thing with a sad...

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After cancelling his Birmingham gig an hour before curtain-up due to illness, the anticipatory hype around whether...

Die My Love review - good lovin' gone bad

Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on the book by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love is an unsettling dive into the disturbed psyche of...

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