book reviews and features
Best of 2021: Books
Friday, 31 December 2021
“Duck! Here comes another year.” We can, I think, all empathise with the motions and emotions of Ogden Nash’s new year poem, “Good Riddance, But Now What?” Before, however, we bid a troublesome... Read more... |
The Holiness of Sex: Leonard Cohen's Biblical Theology
Wednesday, 15 December 2021
On hearing that I had recently written a book about Leonard Cohen, someone asked me why I thought Bob Dylan... Read more... |
Peter Robison: Flying Blind review – a story of decline and crawl
Tuesday, 30 November 2021
Thomas Pynchon’s saturnine '70s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) begins with “[a] screaming [that] comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”... Read more... |
Lucie Elven: The Weak Spot review - a cryptic modern fable
Tuesday, 23 November 2021
For most of us, fluttering our eyelids to convince a loved one to cook dinner is harmless meddling. Complimenting our boss on their new coat before asking for a promotion is necessary cunning. For... Read more... |
Sarah Moss: The Fell review - a dark night on the hills
Monday, 22 November 2021
Sarah Moss’s new novel is a slim snapshot of a moment of fear and danger in the year of Covid. That year when judgement and recrimination ruled, and neighbourly feeling was in short supply. It is... Read more... |
Claire Tomalin: The Young H.G. Wells review – days of the comet
Wednesday, 17 November 2021
In late 1894 an unknown 28-year-old science tutor and wannabe writer finished a story in his dismal lodgings just north of Euston station. Divorced, after a brief, calamitous marriage to a cousin... Read more... |
Devin Jacobsen: Breath Like the Wind at Dawn review – the disturbances of the Civil War
Monday, 15 November 2021
How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins? For Les Tamplin, wife-beater, sheriff, father to three sons, it is a detective... Read more... |
Ruth Ozeki: The Book of Form and Emptiness review - where the objects speak
Friday, 05 November 2021
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra... Read more... |
Mark Bould: The Anthropocene Unconscious review - climate anxiety is written everywhere
Tuesday, 02 November 2021
Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness... Read more... |
Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere - How We Became Post-Modern review - entertaining origin-story for the world of today
Tuesday, 02 November 2021
In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story. “From the world of conventional signs... Read more... |
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