literature
Adam Sisman: The Secret Life of John le Carré review - tinker, tailor, soldier, cheatThursday, 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 a discreet veil over his later private life. But the... 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 Mauritian girl who lives in the novel’s titular village slum... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: Shame review - the translation of painTuesday, 26 September 2023
The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an absorbing examination of how one fleeting moment from childhood can have lasting and unpredictable consequences, and how a life might be... Read more... |
Celia Dale: Sheep's Clothing review - unsettling, mundane, and right on-trendTuesday, 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 crime fiction, or else labeled as a kind of suburban horror.Her astonishing skill, however, lay in the balance... Read more... |
Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse powerMonday, 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: searing is a regular participant, as is honest, and urgent... Read more... |
Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inheritFriday, 01 September 2023
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based on a factual trial and a real, forgotten Victorian author. While the premise is interesting and the story is engaging in itself, this book perhaps... Read more... |
Caitlin Merrett King: Always Open Always Closed review - looking for an approach while trying to do the approachTuesday, 22 August 2023
Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins paratactically, with a list of displacements:MS REAL FEELS POSITIONLESS At her desk in the studio (not as often as she would like) or at the kitchen... Read more... |
Marie Darrieussecq: Sleepless review - in search of lost sleepThursday, 17 August 2023
“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into English by Penny Hueston. The sentence, suspended against the page’s whiteness, a clause unto itself, is simple, short, and... Read more... |
Tony Williams: Cole the Magnificent - fantastical tale blends myth, poetry and comedyTuesday, 15 August 2023
Cole the Magnificent is a picaresque, fantastical tale of the life (or lives) of a man, Cole, following his adventures as he progresses through a mythical pre-Norman Britain, from adolescence to old age, and beyond. It is episodic and poetic, by... Read more... |
Masha Karp: George Orwell and Russia review - dystopia's realityThursday, 10 August 2023
The war in Ukraine, which Russia’s President Vladimir Putin insists on calling a “special military operation”, may have given fresh urgency to George Orwell’s warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the dangers of totalitarian newspeak. Yet, as Masha... Read more... |
Henry Hoke: Open Throat review - if a lion could speakWednesday, 09 August 2023
I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it seemed, at first glance, to be an over-intellectualised prose-cum-poetical text about a mountain lion.But the novel was so much more: an odd but... Read more... |
First Person: Marc Burrows on getting to know Sir Terry PratchettTuesday, 01 August 2023
In a very real sense, Terry Pratchett taught me how to write. I first came across his work when I was 12 years old, in the early 90s.My parents had been given copies of two of the earliest books in his Discworld series, Guards! Guards! and The... Read more... |
