book reviews and features
Charlie Porter: Bring No Clothes - Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion review - dress to impress![]()
It’s not hard to miss the fact that Bloomsbury is back in fashion at the moment. This summer, it felt like everyone’s Instagram story showed a... Read more... |
Adam Sisman: The Secret Life of John le Carré review - tinker, tailor, soldier, cheat![]()
This book is quite a sad read. I had been looking forward to it, as a posthumous supplement to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré/David Cornwell, which, at the time, quite clearly drew... Read more... |
Caspar Henderson: A Book of Noises - Notes on the Auraculous review - a call to ears![]()
Have you ever considered the sheer range of sounds? You may think of deliberate human efforts to move the air: music and song, poetry or... Read more... |
'The people behind the postcards': an interview with Priya Hein, author of 'Riambel'![]()
Priya Hein’s debut novel, Riambel, is an excoriating examination of Mauritius’ socio-political structures and the colonial past from which they have sprung. Centred around Noemi, a young... Read more... |
Michael Peppiatt: Giacometti in Paris review - approaching the impossible![]()
We begin with a dead-end. In 1966, Michael Peppiatt – at the time “an obscure young man” – travelled to Paris to... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: Shame review - the translation of pain![]()
The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an... Read more... |
Warhol, Velázquez, and leaving things out: an interview with Lynne Tillman![]()
Motion Sickness (1991) is the second novel published by the writer, art collector and cultural critic Lynne Tillman. It is difficult,... Read more... |
Celia Dale: Sheep's Clothing review - unsettling, mundane, and right on-trend![]()
Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as... Read more... |
Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse power![]()
Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: ... Read more... |
Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inherit![]()
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based... Read more... |
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