thu 28/03/2024

book reviews and features

Don DeLillo: The Silence review - when the lights of technology go out

India Lewis

Don DeLillo’s latest novella, The Silence, has been marketed with an emphasis on its prescience, describing the...

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Annie Ernaux: A Man's Place review - an intimate portrait, necessarily incomplete

Lydia Bunt

As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of...

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Zaina Arafat: You Exist Too Much review - second-generation love addiction

India Lewis

Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-...

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Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC review - we won't know what we've got until it's gone

Liz Thomson

When in June 2019 the BBC announced plans to restrict free TV licences to households with at least one person aged over...

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Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'

theartsdesk

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in...

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Nicole Krauss: To Be a Man review - first short-story collection from the award-winning novelist

Markie Robson-Scott

Tamar, a character in “The Husband”, one of the most appealing, joyful stories in Nicole Krauss’s new collection...

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Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

India Lewis

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,...

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Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois

theartsdesk

How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to...

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Ben Wilson: Metropolis - A History of Humankind's Greatest Invention review - urban resilience throughout the ages

Daniel Lewis

Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived...

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Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology review - wild writing to stimulate the senses

Daniel Lewis

Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes...

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

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Album: Ride - Interplay

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“The name of this group is Mayan Space Station.” In spite of the billing as The William Parker Trio, their bassist – coolly introducing himself as...

First person: playwright Paul Grellong on keeping pace with...

I’m writing this in the lobby of the...

Album: Sum 41 - Heaven :x: Hell

Sum 41 honour their 27-year career with Heaven :x: Hell, a 20-track double album, due to be their final, without a single skip. Harking...

3 Body Problem, Netflix review - life, the universe and ever...

From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring...

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