Books
David Harsent: Skin review - our strange surfacesSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries... Read more... |
Brian Klaas: Fluke review - why things happen, and can we stop them?Saturday, 27 January 2024
One day in the early 90s I accepted the offer of a lift from a friend to a university open day I hadn’t been planning to go to. I ended up attending that university and there met my wife, and if I hadn’t done that my life would have been very... Read more... |
Richard Schoch: Shakespeare's House review - nothing ill in such a templeThursday, 25 January 2024
Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously... Read more... |
Richard Dorment: Warhol After Warhol review - beyond criticismTuesday, 09 January 2024
2023 was a good year for Andy Warhol post-mortems: after Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, after Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Home, Richard Dorment’s Warhol After Warhol.Their publication journeys undoubtedly benefitted from the value Anglophone... Read more... |
Best of 2023: BooksSunday, 31 December 2023
From wandering Rachmaninoff to Ulysses tribute, or a poet’s boyhood in Dundee to sleeplessness and arboreal inner lives, our reviewers share their literary picks from 2023.Prototype Press continues to publish much of the most interesting British... Read more... |
First Person: novelist Pip Adam on the sound of injusticeWednesday, 20 December 2023
I know it rattles me, so I try to prepare for it. But I am never fully prepared for the noise.The correctional facilities I have visited over the last 30 years are noisy places. A secure building requires strong doors that are opened and shut –... Read more... |
Angela Leighton: Something, I Forget review - the art of letting goMonday, 18 December 2023
Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine, February 2022”, Angela Leighton writes, “Today’s my birthday. Many happy returns. / Elsewhere there’s shot, mortar shells, grenades.”The... Read more... |
Mathias Énard: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild review - a man of infinite deathSaturday, 09 December 2023
"Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief", wrote Amy Levy, "it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new". In Mathias... Read more... |
Anne Michaels: Held review - one story across timeFriday, 24 November 2023
Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will only have one story […] you’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’ The advice might... Read more... |
Ishion Hutchinson: School of Instructions review - learning against estrangementMonday, 20 November 2023
School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are... Read more... |
Jesse Darling: Virgins review - going straightThursday, 16 November 2023
Self-described ‘intermittent poet’ and 2023 Turner Prize-nominee Jesse Darling said this in a recent interview for Art Review: ‘I think about modernity as a fairytale’. The comparison is made in reference to capitalism’s beginnings, as continuous as... Read more... |
Justin Lewis: Don't Stop the Music - A History of Pop Music, One Day at a Time review - deft and delightful pop almanacTuesday, 07 November 2023
This splendid book proves that trivia need not be trivial, and that a miscellany of apparently disconnected facts can cohere, if done well. It is in the proud lineage of the “toilet book”, a form sadly in decline in these days of the smartphone.... Read more... |
