fri 29/03/2024

book reviews and features

Max Porter: Shy review - an ode to boyhood and rage

Izzy Smith

Max Porter continues his fascination with the struggles of youth in his newest release, Shy: his most beautifully-wrought...

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Solmaz Sharif: Customs review - a poetics of exile and return

Jack Barron

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...

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First Person: Sophie Haydock on going beyond the grave

Sophie Haydock

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...

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Lydia Sandgren: Collected Works review - the mysteries that surround us all

India Lewis

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...

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Jonathan Kennedy: Pathogenesis - How Germs Made History review - a return to the infections that formed us

Jon Turney

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...

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Loving Highsmith review - documentary focused on the writer's lighter side

Helen Hawkins

Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this...

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Diana Evans: A House for Alice review - lyrical sequel to Ordinary People

Markie Robson-Scott

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...

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Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinking

Alice Brewer

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...

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Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us

Hannah Hutching

“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...

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Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story

India Lewis

Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book...

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Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War: A Scenario review - on the inco...

"[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...

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Marylebone Theatre review - f...

Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across...

Bach's Easter Oratorio, OAE, Whelan, QEH review - the j...

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...

Album: Jane Weaver - Love In Constant Spectacle

“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play tha...

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 Origin of Evil review - Laure Calamy stars in gripping F...

A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...

Foam, Finborough Theatre review - fascism and f*cking in a G...

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...

Album: Ride - Interplay

What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties ...

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