book reviews and features
Sophia Giovannitti: Working Girl - On Selling Art and Selling Sex review - portrait of the artist as sex worker
Wednesday, 31 May 2023
Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.” I nearly –... Read more... |
Kieran Yates: All the Houses I've Ever Lived In, Brighton Festival 2023 review - home as comfort, and cruelty
Sunday, 28 May 2023
The audience questions are when Kieran Yates’ talk boils over. Her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In considers housing policy through autobiography and imaginative research, and the preceding... Read more... |
Matthew Shindell: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet review - a world of possibility
Friday, 19 May 2023
Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds. So it has... Read more... |
Susan Finlay: The Lives of the Artists review - the knotted threads of memoir and art
Wednesday, 17 May 2023
Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life (1728) is not the artist-biography to which Susan Finlay’s The Lives of the Artists pays its most obvious homage, but it appears to have followed its... Read more... |
Glory to Sound: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brighton Festival 2023 review - a reggae rebel's life in music
Monday, 15 May 2023
Straight-backed at 70, Linton Kwesi Johnson wears the smart garb of a British Caribbean elder – trilby, cream jacket, West Indies maroon jumper and tie, grey trousers, blue socks and grey shoes.... Read more... |
Keggie Carew: Beastly review - the history of animals and us
Monday, 15 May 2023
There’s been an avalanche of books about animals and trees. The more species disappear and forests are felled, the more titles are published: laments, celebrations, extinction alarms and rhapsodic... Read more... |
Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes
Tuesday, 09 May 2023
On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored... Read more... |
A. Anatoli: Babi Yar - The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust review - a masterpiece uncensored
Friday, 05 May 2023
The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was... Read more... |
Max Porter: Shy review - an ode to boyhood and rage
Wednesday, 03 May 2023
Max Porter continues his fascination with the struggles of youth in his newest release, Shy: his most beautifully-wrought... Read more... |
Solmaz Sharif: Customs review - a poetics of exile and return
Monday, 01 May 2023
The language of poetic technique is perhaps weighted towards rupture, rather than reparation: lines end and break, we count beats and stress, experience caesurae (literally ‘cuttings’), and mark... Read more... |
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latest in today
Eileen review - a dank fairytale film noir
As the title character in Eileen, set in a miserable Massachusetts backwater in the days before Christmas 1964, Thomasin McKenzie plays a...
Album: Shirley Hurt - Shirley Hurt
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’...
A Sherlock Carol, Marylebone Theatre review – merry, but mir...
It’s an elementary fact that Dickens sells at this time of year — look at all the perennial Christmas Carols sprouting up everywhere. But...
Macbeth, The Depot, Liverpool review - Ralph Fiennes leads a...
Next door to the beautiful Art Deco Littlewoods Pools Building, nearly 30 years standing derelict, a set of grey sheds stand, a seat of...
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Lyric Theatre review - adult panto del...
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy...
Queendom review - an LGBTQ+ performance artist takes to the...
It takes a brave or a foolhardy person to walk the streets wearing almost nothing but barbed wire and platform shoes, especially when the occasion...
Album: Ghost Woman - Hindsight Is 50/50
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with...
The House of Bernarda Alba, Lyttleton Theatre review - dazzl...
Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at The Almeida; she ends it with...
Album: Trevor Horn - Echoes: Ancient & Modern
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly,...
Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime, Charles Court Opera, Jermyn Str...
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and...