Books
Craig Taylor: New Yorkers - A City and Its People in Our Time reviewMonday, 22 March 2021
For the last couple of years, until we were so rudely interrupted, I’d been spending chunks of the year in New York, a city I’ve come to know well these past 25 years. I’d once found the idea of it intimidating, scary even. A migraine-inducing... Read more... |
Prix Pictet: Confinement review - a year in photographsThursday, 18 March 2021
Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize now in its ninth cycle. Since its launch in 2008, it has responded to the state of the world with urgency and compassion, its shortlists all... Read more... |
Alan Warner: Kitchenly 434 review – dreams and delusions in the backwaters of fameWednesday, 17 March 2021
“They think it’s all drugs and sex up here, Mrs H.” “Bless me.” The reality, at Kitchenly Mill Race, runs more to a nice pot of Tetley’s and a plate of Gypsy Creams. But “people are funny around famous folk”. At this Tudor manor house in Sussex –... Read more... |
Edward St Aubyn: Double Blind review - constructing 'cognition literature'Tuesday, 16 March 2021
If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the science section by mistake. It's a novel that throws its reader in at the deep end, where that end is... Read more... |
Agustín Fernández Mallo: The Things We've Seen review - degrees of separationTuesday, 16 March 2021
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many... Read more... |
Extract from Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe, introduced and edited by Duncan MinshullMonday, 15 March 2021
Wandering, ambling, sauntering. The last, least heard of the three, captures a sense of leisurely aimlessness: a jolly meander unbound by destination, admitting none of the qualms of timekeeping or pacing. In his latest anthology, sequel to Beneath... Read more... |
Nina-Sophia Miralles: Glossy - debut author takes on Vogue and the Condé NastiesMonday, 15 March 2021
“Bringing out a luxury magazine in a blitzkrieg is rather like dressing for dinner in the jungle,” wrote Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue, in December 1940. No slacking was allowed, even in the midst of an air raid. Everyone kept a suitcase... Read more... |
Brenda Navarro: Empty Houses review - the pains and pressures of motherhoodThursday, 11 March 2021
The horror novelist Sarah Langan recently compared motherhood to being treated like a game of Operation. “The point of the game is to correct us by removing our defective bones, to carefully pick us apart. It’s open season.” For the Mexican writer... Read more... |
Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun review - what makes us human?Tuesday, 09 March 2021
Unsettling, unremitting and psychologically stark, Klara and the Sun has all the hallmarks of a traditional Ishiguro novel. Dealing with his familiar themes of loss and love and the question of what makes us human, the book follows the "life" of an... Read more... |
Katherine Angel: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again review – the complexities of consentMonday, 08 March 2021
Katherine Angel borrows the title of her latest book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, from an essay by Foucault. The phrase parodies the supposed sexual liberation on the horizon in the ‘60s and ‘70s, picking apart the notion that sexuality and... Read more... |
Frances Larson: Undreamed Shores review - journeys without mapsTuesday, 02 March 2021
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives... Read more... |
Joseph Andras: Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us review - injustice and tenderness in the Algerian WarThursday, 25 February 2021
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution... Read more... |
