book reviews and features
Sharon Dolin: Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir review - a poet’s life filtered through Hitchcock’s lens
Sunday, 09 August 2020
Poet Sharon Dolin’s memoir Hitchcock Blonde ends (no spoilers) in the same way as... Read more... |
Alex Halberstadt: Young Heroes of the Soviet Union review - a familial history of the twentieth century
Saturday, 08 August 2020
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a collective examination of its past, with Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich at the helm. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union... Read more... |
Hiromi Kawakami: People From My Neighbourhood review - deft and feather-light
Wednesday, 05 August 2020
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My... Read more... |
Ali Smith: Summer review - a hopeful present, beautifully described
Sunday, 02 August 2020
It is no surprise, given her Cambridge Intellectual literary style, that Ali Smith’s Summer is multi-layered, referential, and filled with cameos from giants in the fields of art and... Read more... |
Mary South: You Will Never Be Forgotten review - canny tales of uncanny tech
Sunday, 02 August 2020
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the... Read more... |
Emily St John Mandel: The Glass Hotel review - a Ponzi scheme and its ghostly repercussions
Saturday, 01 August 2020
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel... Read more... |
Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy review - lost friends and new hope
Sunday, 26 July 2020
Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times... Read more... |
Vincent van Gogh: the reader and the writer
Sunday, 26 July 2020
A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are... Read more... |
Jenny Diski: Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Essays review - a posthumous collection from the pages of the LRB
Sunday, 26 July 2020
“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” That was Diski’s response to daughter’s Choe’s observation that if she were buried – a friend had just offered her a spot in a plot she’d... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: author Jorge Consiglio
Sunday, 26 July 2020
Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of... Read more... |
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latest in today
Jonathan Pie, Duke of York's Theatre review - spoof pol...
If you don't like sweary comics – Jonathan Pie uses the c-word liberally – then this may not be the show for you. In fact if you're a Tory, ditto...
Baby Reindeer, Netflix review - a misery memoir disturbingly...
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with...
Machinal, The Old Vic review - note-perfect pity and terror
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s ...
Fantastic Machine review - photography's story from one...
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis...
Simon Boccanegra, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester...
If ever more evidence were needed of Sir Mark Elder’s untiring zest for exploration and love of the thrill of live opera performance, it was this...
All You Need Is Death review - a future folk horror classic
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who...
Album: Jonny Drop • Andrew Ashong - The Puzzle Dust
As I sat down to write this review, the sun came out. It was a salutory reminder of the importance of context: where I’d previously thought “mmm,...
theartsdesk on Vinyl: Record Store Day Special 2024
Record Store Day is tomorrow! At theartsdesk on Vinyl...
If Only I Could Hibernate review - kids in grinding poverty...
Teenage Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh in an elegantly restrained performance) is looking after his little sister and brother in Ulaanbaatar after...
The Book of Clarence review - larky jaunt through biblical e...
The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life...