book reviews and features
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... |
Ellen McWilliams: Resting Places - On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution review - finding art in the inarticulable
Friday, 19 July 2024
How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a... Read more... |
Claire Messud: This Strange Eventful History review - home is where the heart was
Thursday, 18 July 2024
Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is... Read more... |
Paul Alexander: Bitter Crop - The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year review - setting the record straight
Saturday, 06 July 2024
It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure. In this fine, clear-eyed... Read more... |
Kelly Clancy: Playing with Reality - How Games Shape Our World review - how far games go back
Monday, 24 June 2024
For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up, players might find themselves dressing virtual... Read more... |
Hugo Rifkind: Rabbits review - 31 wild parties and a funeral
Monday, 10 June 2024
In some ways I’m an appropriate person to review Hugo Rifkind’s new novel Rabbits, a coming-of-age comedy set in the early... Read more... |
Extract: Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair
Friday, 03 May 2024
Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, alongisde the likes of Ed Dorn and J. H.... Read more... |
Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review - a view from the boundaries
Tuesday, 23 April 2024
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world – and makes from it a diverting and informative read... Read more... |
Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earths review - a whole new world
Thursday, 18 April 2024
Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a... Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Album: Sally Shapiro - Ready to Live a Lie
Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical...
Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works...
So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico”. Which would be...
When the Light Breaks review - only lovers left alive
Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic...
Marwood, Crabb, Wigmore Hall review - tangos, laments and an...
James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a...
Blu-ray: Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA
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Dennis, RSNO, Dunedin Consort, Søndergård, Usher Hall, Edinb...
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Dara Ó Briain, Soho Theatre Walthamstow review - master stor...
Dara Ó Briain’s has described his previous show So… Where Were We? – in which he describes his search for his birth...
Album: Anna Lapwood - Firedove
This album Firedove (Sony Classical), surely, has to be seen as part of a bigger story: that of organist, choir director and...