book reviews and features
Sunjeev Sahota: China Room review - separate, related lives
Monday, 10 May 2021
China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the... Read more... |
Extract: Blackface by Ayanna Thompson
Thursday, 06 May 2021
Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by... Read more... |
Kate Lebo: The Book of Difficult Fruit review - a rich, juicy delight
Tuesday, 27 April 2021
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it... Read more... |
Michael Spitzer: The Musical Human review - charting our age-old relationship with music
Wednesday, 21 April 2021
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become.... Read more... |
Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott: Failures of State review - a devastating exposé, slightly mistimed
Wednesday, 14 April 2021
Almost a year ago, in the midst of the first national lockdown, The Sunday Times broke the news that Boris Johnson had failed to attend five consecutive Cobra meetings in the lead up to... Read more... |
Polly Barton: Fifty Sounds review - what is lost in translation
Tuesday, 13 April 2021
Fifty Sounds is translator Polly Barton’s first novel, conceived as part of Fitzcarraldo’s annual... Read more... |
Andrea Bajani: If You Kept a Record of Sins review - where blame, grief and discovery meet
Wednesday, 07 April 2021
“I think it happened to you, too, the first time you arrived.” So begins Andrea Bajani’s second novel (... Read more... |
Will Page: Tarzan Economics - a 'rockonomist' writes
Wednesday, 31 March 2021
The idea behind Tarzan Economics is, in its essence, that “if the vine we are holding onto is withering, we can have confidence to reach out for a new one.” This thesis expounded in Will... Read more... |
Extract: TV by Susan Bordo
Tuesday, 30 March 2021
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Author Sam Mills on the phenomenon of the 'chauvo-feminist'
Monday, 29 March 2021
Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which... Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Peter Grimes, Welsh National Opera review - febrile energy a...
Emotions run high at WNO these days. When the company’s co-...
Frang, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - every beauty revealed
When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I...
Kenny Garrett, Ronnie Scott's review - a mixed bag
The sax-player Kenny Garrett established a reputation as one of Miles Davis’s band in the Amandla (1989) period. He was also a member of...
Album: Sofia Härdig - Lighthouse of Glass
The titular “lighthouse of glass” is a place where the narrator is “crying into the sun,” in which there is a need to “stand by my solitude.”...
Music Reissues Weekly: Ibex Band - Stereo Instrumental Music
Stereo Instrumental Music was recorded in July 1976 and originally issued only on cassette. The release was organised by...
Blu-ray: Yojimbo / Sanjuro
Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught...
Levit, Sternath, Wigmore Hall review - pushing the boundarie...
Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in...
Rhinoceros, Almeida Theatre review - joyously absurd and abs...
Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by...
Mr Burton review - modest film about the birth of an extraor...
Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he...