book reviews and features
Sunday Book: Nadeem Aslam - The Golden Legend
Sunday, 01 January 2017
Elegant literary romance and contemporary jihadism are unlikely bedfellows. Yet British-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has now written a third novel combining the two. While The... Read more... |
Richard Adams: 'If I'd known how well I could write I’d have started earlier'
Wednesday, 28 December 2016
Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he... Read more... |
Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to Hollywood
Saturday, 24 December 2016
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Treasure Palaces - Great Writers Visit Great Museums
Sunday, 18 December 2016
The modern experience of visiting museums is so far from the hushed contemplation envisaged by our Victorian forebears that the very idea is sufficient to induce a rosy glow of nostalgia, as... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Ruth Franklin - Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Sunday, 11 December 2016
When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’... Read more... |
Shirley Jackson: A Rising Star at 100
Tuesday, 06 December 2016
My mother has been rediscovered, if she ever went away. She is suddenly a rising star, 51 years after her early death. Interest in Shirley Jackson’s novels and stories has blossomed significantly... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Günter Grass - Of All That Ends
Sunday, 04 December 2016
In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As... Read more... |
Carols From King's: How a tradition was made
Sunday, 27 November 2016
For the first decade of its life, King’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols remained a local phenomenon, a “gift to the City of Cambridge”. But that all changed in 1928 with the first BBC... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Lynne Truss - The Lunar Cats
Sunday, 27 November 2016
Once they’ve died nine times, Lynne Truss’s evil talking cats become immortal. Whether Truss has such ambitions for the literary lifespan of her curiously addictive feline thrillers,... Read more... |
Sunday Book: The New Yorker Book of the 60s
Sunday, 20 November 2016
As the United States – and the world – agonises over the coming of Donald Trump, it seems to many of us that all hope is almost irretrievably lost. How timely, then, is the publication of a... 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?
latest in today
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opera North review - one of the b...
Martin Duncan’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of the best and funniest things Opera North has ever done – back...
Rose Matafeo, Arcola Theatre review - Starstruck star muses...
Rose Matafeo knows how to make an entrance, as she enters the stage with a choreographed dance. She's useless at ending things, she says – shows,...
Album: MC5 - Heavy Lifting
MC5 were the original proto-punkers who led the charge against wafty hippy music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were touted by...
A Raisin in the Sun, Lyric Hammersmith review - of race and...
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also...
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remake
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw...
Disclaimer, Apple TV+ review - a misfiring revenge saga from...
It seems to be silly season for big-name directors...
Music Reissues Weekly: Arvo Pärt - Tabula Rasa
In 2022, Spritualized’s Jason Pierce described his musical goal as "trying to find somewhere between Arvo Pärt and The Stooges.” Amongst the most...
The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera review - James...
At first, you wonder if the peculiar voice of Henry James’s maybe unreliable narrator can be preserved in this production. Surely the outcome is...
London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip t...
Conclave
Director Edward Berger won an...
The Last of the Sea Women review - a moving tale of feisty t...
“The ocean is our home… Even in my next life I will dive again,” says Geum Ok, one of a band of female divers from Jeju, a volcanic island 60...