book reviews and features
Goran Vojnović: The Fig Tree review - falling apart together as Yugoslavia splits
Tuesday, 15 December 2020
Seven years ago, at a literary festival in the Croatian port of Pula, I heard Goran Vojnović talk about... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: poet laureate Simon Armitage on landscapes, libraries, home and edgelands
Thursday, 10 December 2020
Simon Armitage is a poet at the top of his game: in his second year as poet laureate, he has given voice to the... Read more... |
Don DeLillo: The Silence review - when the lights of technology go out
Tuesday, 08 December 2020
Don DeLillo’s latest novella, The Silence, has been marketed with an emphasis on its prescience, describing the... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: A Man's Place review - an intimate portrait, necessarily incomplete
Tuesday, 01 December 2020
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of... Read more... |
Zaina Arafat: You Exist Too Much review - second-generation love addiction
Monday, 30 November 2020
Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-... Read more... |
Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC review - we won't know what we've got until it's gone
Monday, 30 November 2020
When in June 2019 the BBC announced plans to restrict free TV licences to households with at least one person aged over... Read more... |
Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'
Tuesday, 24 November 2020
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in... Read more... |
Nicole Krauss: To Be a Man review - first short-story collection from the award-winning novelist
Thursday, 19 November 2020
Tamar, a character in “The Husband”, one of the most appealing, joyful stories in Nicole Krauss’s new collection... Read more... |
Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite
Wednesday, 18 November 2020
This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,... Read more... |
Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois
Monday, 16 November 2020
How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to... Read more... |
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