mon 25/08/2025

book reviews and features

CD - The Lost Words: Spell Songs

Tim Cumming

Earlier this year, eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever...

Read more...

Svetlana Alexievich: Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories review - anything but childish

Katherine Waters

Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with...

Read more...

Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous review – the new avant-garde

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because...

Read more...

Cate Haste: Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler review - a racy life pacily narrated

David Nice

Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the greatest Jewish artists, Alma Mahler/Gropius/Werfel...

Read more...

Anthony B. Atkinson: Measuring Poverty Around the World review - first, second and third world problems

Liz Thomson

Five years ago, when the world was still reeling from 2008 and Britain from the swinging axe of George Osborne, Thomas Piketty’s Capital was an unlikely bestseller. It was a book probably...

Read more...

Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad review - a Soviet national epic

Tom Birchenough

Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on...

Read more...

Hiromi Kawakami: The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino review - Don Juan as a salaryman

Boyd Tonkin

My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That...

Read more...

Thomas Harris: Cari Mora review – mayhem in Miami

Boyd Tonkin

This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road...

Read more...

Mike Jay: Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic review - multiple perspectives

Katherine Waters

Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to...

Read more...

Ben Okri, Brighton Festival 2019 review - adventures in writing

Katie Colombus

If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival...

Read more...

Pages

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

The future of Arts Journalism

 

You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!

We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £49,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

 

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
The Gathered Leaves, Park Theatre review - dated script lift...

The Gathered Leaves is set on the tectonic plates of a middle-class family...

As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, Edinburgh International...

There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh...

Album: Nova Twins - Parasites and Butterflies

For Nova Twins, the alternative rock/metal duo of Amy Love and Georgia South, the years since 2020 have been a non-stop journey of evolution....

Oslo Stories Trilogy: Sex review - sexual identity slips, hu...

Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at...

BBC Proms: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mäkelä review - de...

Klaus Mäkelä teased out all the fragility and the sense of impending mortality in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, revealing a vision that was as...

Hostage, Netflix review - entente not-too-cordiale

Conceived and written by Matt Charman, whose CV...

Music Reissues Weekly: The Beatles - What's The New, Ma...

“What's the New Mary Jane” is a nursery rhyme-like song, one of John Lennon’s most peculiar offerings. It was recorded for late 1968’s double...

Dunedin Consort, Butt / D’Angelo, Muñoz, Edinburgh Internati...

Handel probably wrote his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in 1707 while he was in the service of the Marquis of Ruspoli in Rome. It tells...

The Maccabees, Barrowland, Glasgow review - indie band retur...

You wait years for a guitar group with brothers to reunite and then two come along at once. The Maccabees return might have attracted far less...

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters