fri 29/08/2025

book reviews and features

Michael Peppiatt: Giacometti in Paris review - approaching the impossible

Jack Barron

We begin with a dead-end. In 1966, Michael Peppiatt – at the time “an obscure young man” – travelled to Paris to...

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Annie Ernaux: Shame review - the translation of pain

India Lewis

The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an...

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Warhol, Velázquez, and leaving things out: an interview with Lynne Tillman

Alice Brewer

Motion Sickness (1991) is the second novel published by the writer, art collector and cultural critic Lynne Tillman. It is difficult,...

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Celia Dale: Sheep's Clothing review - unsettling, mundane, and right on-trend

CP Hunter

Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as...

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Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse power

Jack Barron

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: ...

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Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inherit

India Lewis

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based...

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Caitlin Merrett King: Always Open Always Closed review - looking for an approach while trying to do the approach

Alice Brewer

Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins...

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Marie Darrieussecq: Sleepless review - in search of lost sleep

Jack Barron

“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into...

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Tony Williams: Cole the Magnificent - fantastical tale blends myth, poetry and comedy

Bernard Hughes

Cole the Magnificent is a picaresque, fantastical tale of the life (or lives) of a man, Cole, following...

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Masha Karp: George Orwell and Russia review - dystopia's reality

Hugh Barnes

The war in Ukraine, which Russia’s President Vladimir Putin insists on calling a “special military operation”, may have given fresh urgency to...

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