Books
theartsdesk
Wandering, ambling, sauntering. The last, least heard of the three, captures a sense of leisurely aimlessness: a jolly meander unbound by destination, admitting none of the qualms of timekeeping or pacing. In his latest anthology, sequel to Beneath My Feet (2018), "laureate of walking" Duncan Minshull brings together 60 writers, from Petrarch to Patrick Leigh Fermor, Edith Wharton to Edward Lear, and Edith Wharton to Robert Macfarlane, who have roamed the routes of Europe. An expansive collection, it's an ode to sauntering, in all its pleasures and variety. The below is an extract from Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Bringing out a luxury magazine in a blitzkrieg is rather like dressing for dinner in the jungle,” wrote Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue, in December 1940. No slacking was allowed, even in the midst of an air raid. Everyone kept a suitcase beside their desks, not for spare clothes or a toothbrush, but for lay-outs and copy, though Withers put on her gas-mask and carried on writing anyway as shelling blew out the windows around her. And in the basement shelter, six floors down, everyone resumed work immediately. Even fashion shoots took place underground. Nothing can stop Vogue. Beauty Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
The horror novelist Sarah Langan recently compared motherhood to being treated like a game of Operation. “The point of the game is to correct us by removing our defective bones, to carefully pick us apart. It’s open season.” For the Mexican writer Brenda Navarro motherhood is also a sort of hollowing out, but it’s a different kind of open season. For her, mothers must “be empty houses ready to accommodate life or death, but, when it comes down to it, empty.” In her harrowing debut novel Empty Houses, it feels as though Navarro opens every door to every room.The book tells the tale of a child’ Read more ...
India Lewis
Unsettling, unremitting and psychologically stark, Klara and the Sun has all the hallmarks of a traditional Ishiguro novel. Dealing with his familiar themes of loss and love and the question of what makes us human, the book follows the "life" of an Artificial Friend (AF) called Klara, taken from her store of robot compatriots and left to navigate the complex world of human emotions. These AFs are companions for the children of this world, there throughout their infancy and then discarded as they reach maturity. Set against this background, the AFs' devotion to their children points to the Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
Katherine Angel borrows the title of her latest book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, from an essay by Foucault. The phrase parodies the supposed sexual liberation on the horizon in the ‘60s and ‘70s, picking apart the notion that sexuality and pleasure are intrinsically linked to some future freedom to speak. For Angel, too, there is no single place or time where desire will be perfect; the notion is, rather, a perpetual work in progress. Accordingly, in the ironically titled Tomorrow, she challenges the notion that consent means good sex. Sometimes, women do not know exactly what they want Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives; she joined the men on risky forays into other communities “that had never seen a white person before, but she never recorded any animosity from them”. Later, in 1936, she relocated to the remote interior of New Guinea. There she lived among the “remarkably inscrutable” Anga people, fabled for their ritualised violence, in a region feared and Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution of Fernand Iveton, the only Algerian-born European (or “pied-noir”) to have been subject to the death penalty during the conflict. It remains one of the most ignominious episodes of the Algerian War of Independence. Ignominious but largely forgotten. Iveton’s case received attention from the likes of Simone Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, a “pied Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Havana, 1993. Far away, the fall of the Soviet empire has suddenly stripped Fidel Castro’s Cuba of subsidy and protection, while the US blockade strangles options for an economic reboot close to home. State-imposed “austerity” ushers in the “Special Period”, when cuts, shortages and even hunger return. “A butterfly had fluttered its wings on the other side of the Atlantic,” as Karla Suárez’s narrator – a mathematician – puts it. The chaotic fallout that ensues strikes hard “on this island, in this unstable system”. You might expect a novel set in Havana during those bleak days to make for a Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Amina Cain is a writer of near-naked spaces and roomy characters. Her debut collection of short fiction, I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009), located itself in the potential strangeness of everyday thoughts and experience. Her second, Creature (Dorothy, 2013), was likewise interested in the weirdness of being in the world. Indelicacy is her first novel: a slim, lucidly imagined account of a cleaner who is captivated by the paintings at the art museum where she works, and by the idea of writing about herself looking at them. In an undefined past and place, Vitória’s lot changes Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) had much more than an astonishingly powerful voice. It may already be almost a hundred years since she made her most significant recordings – she is from an era before amplification – and yet her unfailing capacity to hold the listener’s attention, to tell stories that sound deeply rooted in her own personal experience still hits home every time.In this time when grieving is all around us, we can sometimes lose any sense of what is real and what is dreamt, and the immediacy of a song like “Graveyard Dream Blues” in which Bessie Smith imagines she is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is a novel, says Patricia Lockwood in her Twitter feed, about being very inside the internet and then being very outside of it. At first, I thought the title referred to aspects of the internet and its disappearing history, as in, “'MySpace was an entire life’, she nearly wept at a bookstore in Chicago… ‘And it is lost, lost, lost.’”I started to think about the other lost things that no one talks about now: Compuserve, Netscape, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, all those pre-Google search engines, and the world before the iPhone, when the idea of looking up the name of an actor you’d forgotten as Read more ...
James Dowsett
CLR James came to London from Trinidad in 1932, clutching the manuscript of his first and only novel. He soon found work, writing about cricket for the Manchester Guardian, as well as a political faith, revolutionary Trotskyism, which would inspire him to set aside his literary ambitions for political activism. James would instead make his name as one of the finest intellectuals of the 20th century. The Black Jacobins, his pioneering study of the Haitian Revolution, led by the charismatic, ex-slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, became a ground-breaking work of black history.Minty Alley is ultimately Read more ...