book reviews and features
Max Porter: Shy review - an ode to boyhood and rageWednesday, 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 returnMonday, 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 graveThursday, 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 allTuesday, 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 usFriday, 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 sideThursday, 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 PeopleTuesday, 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 sinkingSaturday, 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 usTuesday, 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 storyTuesday, 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... |
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In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of ...
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to...
Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across...
Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter...
“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...
I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead...
The screenwriting debut of actor Andrew Buchan,...
A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet...