book reviews and features
Ali Smith: Summer review - a hopeful present, beautifully described
Sunday, 02 August 2020
It is no surprise, given her Cambridge Intellectual literary style, that Ali Smith’s Summer is multi-layered, referential, and filled with cameos from giants in the fields of art and... Read more... |
Mary South: You Will Never Be Forgotten review - canny tales of uncanny tech
Sunday, 02 August 2020
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the... Read more... |
Emily St John Mandel: The Glass Hotel review - a Ponzi scheme and its ghostly repercussions
Saturday, 01 August 2020
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel... Read more... |
Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy review - lost friends and new hope
Sunday, 26 July 2020
Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times... Read more... |
Vincent van Gogh: the reader and the writer
Sunday, 26 July 2020
A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are... Read more... |
Jenny Diski: Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Essays review - a posthumous collection from the pages of the LRB
Sunday, 26 July 2020
“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” That was Diski’s response to daughter’s Choe’s observation that if she were buried – a friend had just offered her a spot in a plot she’d... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: author Jorge Consiglio
Sunday, 26 July 2020
Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of... Read more... |
Luis Sagasti: A Musical Offering review – the sounds of silence
Sunday, 19 July 2020
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like... Read more... |
Bette Howland: Blue in Chicago review – the city on trial, with the writer as witness
Tuesday, 07 July 2020
You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation... Read more... |
Terri White: Coming Undone review - a British journalist unravels in NYC
Sunday, 05 July 2020
The journalistic addiction-memoir is a crowded genre these days: Details editor Dan Perez chronicles his massive intake of Vicodin and other opioids in As Needed for Pain; ... Read more... |
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