book reviews and features
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Tuesday, 31 December 2024
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com. It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and... Read more... |
Jeff Young: Wild Twin review - a box of tricks
Wednesday, 27 November 2024
The writer, performer, and lecturer Jeff Young’s latest, Wild Twin, tells – ostensibly – the story of his barefoot, Beat-imitative journey through northern Europe in the 1980s. However,... Read more... |
Interview: rising star Chloe Savage on the Arctic, outer space, and igniting children's wonder for the unknown
Thursday, 21 November 2024
How old were you when you first had an image of the Arctic? When you first had that image, what was it that most resonated? Was it its remoteness, the endless snow and ice, the polar bears? Did it... Read more... |
Jon Fosse: Morning and Evening review - after thoughts
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive... Read more... |
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More review - fuel for thought
Thursday, 07 November 2024
If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come... Read more... |
Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings review - a gift that keeps on giving
Monday, 04 November 2024
In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and... Read more... |
Jonathan Coe: The Proof of My Innocence review - a whodunnit with a difference
Tuesday, 29 October 2024
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema
Tuesday, 22 October 2024
You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-... Read more... |
Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid prose
Tuesday, 22 October 2024
In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected... Read more... |
Stevie Smith: Not Waving But Drowning review - riding the wave
Wednesday, 02 October 2024
Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, Faber &... Read more... |
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latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Currie, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - s...
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The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All...
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If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then...