mon 03/11/2025

book reviews and features

theartsdesk Q&A: author Jorge Consiglio

Olivia Fletcher

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...

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Luis Sagasti: A Musical Offering review – the sounds of silence

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Bette Howland: Blue in Chicago review – the city on trial, with the writer as witness

Daniel Lewis

You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation...

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Terri White: Coming Undone review - a British journalist unravels in NYC

Markie Robson-Scott

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; ...

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Camille Laurens: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen review - the story of a sculpture

Charlie Stone

Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young...

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Tahar Ben Jelloun: The Punishment review - triumph over torture

Katherine Waters

In July 1966, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s life changed. As punishment for participating in a peaceful student demonstration against the authoritarian King Hassan II of...

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A. Kendra Greene: The Museum of Whales You Will Never See review - a thoughtful museum piece

India Lewis

The Museum of Whales is an unfolding: a slow process of describing a country, its people, and its past through its esoteric and bizarre museums. The book is structured into galleries...

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Joseph Mazur: The Clock Mirage review – brief histories of time

Boyd Tonkin

The Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, which have plagued thinkers for around 2500 years, tell us that super-speedy Achilles can never outrun the tortoise and that an arrow in flight must always...

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Margarita García Robayo: Holiday Heart review – understated and acute

Jessica Payn

The epigraph chosen for Holiday Heart locates the book within the tense of an “afterwards”: not passion, but what follows, the wakeful lull and wide-eyed studying of another, in which...

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Yuri Herrera: A Silent Fury review – the fire last time

Boyd Tonkin

History, as protestors around the world currently insist, can be the art of forgetting – and erasure – as much as of memory. Although it explores a single incident from a century ago, Yuri Herrera...

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