sat 19/07/2025

book reviews and features

Mark Fisher: Postcapitalist Desire - The Final Lectures review - imagining the alternative

Daniel Baksi

Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures is a collection of transcripts, recording weekly group lectures...

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Julia Bell: Radical Attention review - a clear rendering of our withering attention spans

Lydia Bunt

You go out for a walk and leave your devices at home; your head feels a little bit clearer. But when you get back and plonk yourself...

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George Saunders: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain review – Russian lessons in literature and life

Boyd Tonkin

Before he published fiction, George Saunders trained as an engineer and wrote technical reports. The Booker-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo,...

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Courttia Newland: A River Called Time review - an ethereality check

Charlie Stone

It is near impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if slavery and colonialism had...

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Best of 2020: Books

theartsdesk

Stuck in our homes for most of this year, we found comfort and escape from books in ways unprecedented in 2020. The chance to dwell in alternative spaces, or inhabit different rhythms of living....

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Book extract: Fat by Hanne Blank

theartsdesk

"Ugh, I just feel so fat today," the woman near me in the locker room says to her friend as they get dressed after their workout. I look over – discreetly, as one does – to catch a glimpse of the...

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Goran Vojnović: The Fig Tree review - falling apart together as Yugoslavia splits

Boyd Tonkin

Seven years ago, at a literary festival in the Croatian port of Pula, I heard Goran Vojnović talk about...

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theartsdesk Q&A: poet laureate Simon Armitage on landscapes, libraries, home and edgelands

India Lewis

Simon Armitage is a poet at the top of his game: in his second year as poet laureate, he has given voice to the...

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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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