book reviews and features
Goran Vojnović: The Fig Tree review - falling apart together as Yugoslavia splits![]()
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
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![]()
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![]()
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![]()
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![]()
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'![]()
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![]()
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![]()
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![]()
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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