book reviews and features
John Grisham: Camino Winds review - morality tale with a light touch
Sunday, 24 May 2020
John Grisham is a brand, in the sense that the reader relies on some sense of what the product is going to be. He is well up in the millions of sales, along with other writers under the “... Read more... |
Maria Reva: Good Citizens Need Not Fear review - tales of gloomy humour and absurdist charm
Tuesday, 19 May 2020
Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and... Read more... |
Khaled Nurul Hakim: The Book of Naseeb review – a bold debut
Sunday, 17 May 2020
A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from... Read more... |
'What Grandma said (Grandma’s Corona)': sonnets by Claudia Daventry
Sunday, 17 May 2020
A year plagued by Coronavirus is surely a time to dust off a seldom-aired... Read more... |
Caroline Maclean: Circles and Squares review - adventurous art, progressive living and a good gossip
Monday, 11 May 2020
There was a moment in the 1930s when it seemed that contemporary art, as practised in Britain, might join the... Read more... |
Rutger Bregman: Humankind, a Hopeful History review – nice guys finish first
Sunday, 10 May 2020
In retrospect, we will surely see that British battles over the Covid-19 lockdown harboured within them a bitter but half-hidden war of ideas. On one side, the behavioural scientists who first... Read more... |
Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli - III of III
Friday, 08 May 2020
At the end of an exhausting day's driving punctuated by disappointments and false leads, the narrator finds herself back at the Israeli town of Nirim where she spends the night. Slipping off... Read more... |
Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli - II of III
Wednesday, 06 May 2020
The second half of Minor Detail is narrated in the first person by a young Palestinian woman who reads an article about the rape and murder of the captured girl. When she finds out... Read more... |
Book extract: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Monday, 04 May 2020
The first half of Minor Detail is set in an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert in August 1949, during the conflict celebrated as the War of Independence in Israel and a year... Read more... |
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld: The Discomfort of Evening review - lovelessness, loneliness, bodies and their limits
Sunday, 03 May 2020
“I was ten and stopped taking off my coat.” This bare beginning marks the opening of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s startling and lyrical novel, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison: an... Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
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...
Kahchun Wong’s final concert of 2024 in the Hallé Manchester season was something of a surprise. At first sight, the sparkle in the programme...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 87: Roots Manuva, Bogdan Raczynski, Son...
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Blood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)
...
Blu-ray: Juggernaut
That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the...
Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dubl...
How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the...
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Ta...
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial...
Album: Panelia - Nothing and All At Once
Nothing and All at Once is the debut album from New Delhi...
Music Reissues Weekly: John Cale - The Academy in Peril, Par...
The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All...
Blu-ray: Black Tuesday
The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major...
The Importance of Being Earnest, National Theatre review - n...
If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then...