book reviews and features
Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere - How We Became Post-Modern review - entertaining origin-story for the world of today
Tuesday, 02 November 2021
In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story. “From the world of conventional signs... Read more... |
Selva Almada: Brickmakers review – men dying for love
Monday, 01 November 2021
To make bricks you torment the soft, moist and fluid material of clay and sand in a prison of fire until it becomes dry, hard and unyielding. In Selva Almada’s rural... Read more... |
Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands review - passion in the parchment
Wednesday, 13 October 2021
Outside Wales – even, perhaps, within it – few students will have run across the verse of Gwerful Mechain. The free-... Read more... |
Marcin Wicha: Things I Didn’t Throw Out review - the stories told by stacks of stuff
Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna never talked about her death. A Jewish counsellor based in an office built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, her days were consumed by work and her passion... Read more... |
Jonathan Franzen: Crossroads review - can goodness ever be its own reward?
Monday, 11 October 2021
It’s Christmas 1971 in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and pastor Russ Hildebrandt has plans for... Read more... |
Sarah Hall: Burntcoat review - love after the end of the world
Saturday, 09 October 2021
Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or... Read more... |
First Person: Andrea Levy's husband recalls her path toward becoming a novelist
Thursday, 07 October 2021
The opening sentence of Andrea’s 2010 historical novel The Long Song ... Read more... |
Wole Soyinka: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth review – sprawling satire of modern-day Nigeria
Thursday, 07 October 2021
Eight-years passed between the publication of Wole Soyinka’s debut novel, The Interpreters (1965), and his second, Season of Anomy (1973). A lot happened in... Read more... |
Extract: The Breaks by Julietta Singh
Wednesday, 06 October 2021
How do we mother “at the end of the world”? Among the ruins of late capitalism, climate catastrophe, and entrenched white state violence? Julietta Singh “admit[s]... Read more... |
Ananyo Bhattacharya: The Man from the Future review - the man, the maths, the brain
Tuesday, 05 October 2021
Suppose I’m a novelist plotting a panoramic narrative through world-shaping moments of the first half of the 20th century. I’ll need a character who can visit a bunch of key sites. Göttingen in... Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
theartsdesk at the East Neuk Festival 2022 - on Cloud Nine f...
Last year’s relatively slimline East Neuk Festival felt like a feast in time of plague. This July everything was back to full strength in numerous...
Jessie Burton: The House of Fortune review - a muted, sensit...
A sequel is always a hard thing to write, especially if the book that precedes it is a bestseller, adapted for television and read by more than a...
Album: Viagra Boys - Cave World
The third album from Stockholm rowdies Viagra Boys doesn’t muck about with what they do, but it’s more persistently punkin’ than their last. There...
Mick Jagger: My Life as a Rolling Stone review, BBC Two - th...
At the beginning of this film, Mick Jagger says: “What most...
Alcina, Glyndebourne review - Handel on the strand
Reviewing the Grange Festival production of Tamerlano the other day, I noted the difficulty...
Favour, Bush Theatre review - Ambreen Razia's punchy ne...
Where should Leila live — Ilford or Kent? It doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering decision for a 15-year-old to make, but the stakes...
Album: Laura Veirs - Found Light
The last minute of Found Light’s third track “Seaside Haiku” is defined by the repetition of a single phrase: “give but don’t give too...
Music Reissues Weekly: Ferkat Al Ard - Oghneya
Oghneya opens with the extraordinary “Matar Al Sabah.” Jazzy, with an overt Brazilian feel it gently swings and swoons....
The Making of Pinocchio, LIFT 2022, Battersea Arts Centre re...
Pinocchio is one of our most irreverent metamorphosis stories, and in this visually ingenious blend of...
