book reviews and features
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... |
First Person: Sophie Haydock on going beyond the grave
Thursday, 27 April 2023
It was a cold day in Vienna when Egon Schiele was buried in the Ober-Sankt-Veit cemetery. He was just 28 years old. The controversial... Read more... |
Lydia Sandgren: Collected Works review - the mysteries that surround us all
Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it... Read more... |
Jonathan Kennedy: Pathogenesis - How Germs Made History review - a return to the infections that formed us
Friday, 14 April 2023
The Cayapo tribe, a shade under 10,000 strong, lived in South America unacquainted with humans in the wider world until 1903. That year, they accepted a missionary who, along with news of... Read more... |
Loving Highsmith review - documentary focused on the writer's lighter side
Thursday, 13 April 2023
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this... Read more... |
Diana Evans: A House for Alice review - lyrical sequel to Ordinary People
Tuesday, 04 April 2023
Diana Evans specialises in houses, their baleful quirks and the meaning of home. In her acclaimed third novel, Ordinary People (2018), formerly happy, black couple Melissa and Michael... Read more... |
Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinking
Saturday, 01 April 2023
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the... Read more... |
Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us
Tuesday, 28 March 2023
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat. Lecturing a teenage coven on the art... Read more... |
Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story
Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book... Read more... |
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history
Saturday, 11 March 2023
For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions... Read more... |
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Gogol Bordello, O2 Institute, Birmingham review – an incendi...
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Anselm review - post-war German reckonings in 3D
Water glassily reflects in a bridal train, the sun moves between trees, giving way to metal book-leaves, and inside a warehouse so vast he cycles...
Talking About the Fire, Royal Court review – urgent and info...
Let’s start with what we know: the climate emergency is the single most burning question facing the planet. Our life on earth depends on tackling...
I Fagiolini, Hollingworth, St Martin-in-the-Fields review -...
“Nobody likes a Messiah…”, deadpanned Robert Hollingworth, with the timing of a practised stand-up. After a pause, “…more than I do.” At...
Music Reissues Weekly: Chelsea - The Step-Forward Years
On 21 June 1977, listeners to John Peel’s radio show heard a song titled “Pretty Vacant.” It wasn’t a preview of the forthcoming Sex Pistols...
Please Don't Destroy: Treasure of Foggy Mountain review...
Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch...
Wonka review - a confusingly mixed bag of bonbons
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages...
Smyrna review - Greece at twilight
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject...