book reviews and features
Charlie Porter: Bring No Clothes - Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion review - dress to impress
Thursday, 26 October 2023
It’s not hard to miss the fact that Bloomsbury is back in fashion at the moment. This summer, it felt like everyone’s Instagram story showed a... Read more... |
Adam Sisman: The Secret Life of John le Carré review - tinker, tailor, soldier, cheat
Thursday, 12 October 2023
This book is quite a sad read. I had been looking forward to it, as a posthumous supplement to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré/David Cornwell, which, at the time, quite clearly drew... Read more... |
Caspar Henderson: A Book of Noises - Notes on the Auraculous review - a call to ears
Thursday, 05 October 2023
Have you ever considered the sheer range of sounds? You may think of deliberate human efforts to move the air: music and song, poetry or... Read more... |
'The people behind the postcards': an interview with Priya Hein, author of 'Riambel'
Tuesday, 03 October 2023
Priya Hein’s debut novel, Riambel, is an excoriating examination of Mauritius’ socio-political structures and the colonial past from which they have sprung. Centred around Noemi, a young... Read more... |
Michael Peppiatt: Giacometti in Paris review - approaching the impossible
Thursday, 28 September 2023
We begin with a dead-end. In 1966, Michael Peppiatt – at the time “an obscure young man” – travelled to Paris to... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: Shame review - the translation of pain
Tuesday, 26 September 2023
The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an... Read more... |
Warhol, Velázquez, and leaving things out: an interview with Lynne Tillman
Friday, 22 September 2023
Motion Sickness (1991) is the second novel published by the writer, art collector and cultural critic Lynne Tillman. It is difficult,... Read more... |
Celia Dale: Sheep's Clothing review - unsettling, mundane, and right on-trend
Tuesday, 19 September 2023
Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as... Read more... |
Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse power
Monday, 04 September 2023
Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: ... Read more... |
Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inherit
Friday, 01 September 2023
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based... Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Reflections on 'Echoes' in Pink Floyd's Resto...
Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, the ineffable progressive rock epic that occupies side two of...
Album: Sleep Token - Even In Arcadia
It has never been an exact science understanding when something will capture lightning in a bottle and go viral. Even less expected is for an...
The Trunk, Netflix review - stylish, noir-ish Korean drama w...
The trunk in the title is a luxury item, worth 50 million won – just north of £27,000 – shown sinking in deep water in the opening...
The Gang of Three, King's Head Theatre - three old Labo...
There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the...
Words of War review - truth and other casualties of war
The reporting of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006 – on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, a...
theartsdesk Q&A: Gary Oldman on playing John Cheever in...
Gary Oldman has always lived life to the fullest, on screen and off. Maybe that's why he is often at his best in his pitch-perfect portraits of...
Album: Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke - Tall Tales
I’ve got an admission: I never really got Radiohead, in no small part because of Thom Yorke’s singing. I appreciate his technical abilities and...
The Excursions of Mr Brouček, LSO, Rattle, Barbican review -...
Who doesn’t love the quirky, passionate and humanitarian genius of Leoš Janáček? All of it, these days. Since Charles...
Conversations After Sex, Park Theatre review - pillow talk p...
In Dublin, a city that has changed more than most in the last 30 years, a young woman, with an English accent that is expensive to...