Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. Paul Thomas Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another (loosely based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland), is a critical and commercial hit; and his new novel Shadow Ticket is garnering the sort of reviews and attention that generally tend to accrue to authors with much less of an aversion to playing the publicity game. 

Into the Groove is Justin Lewis’s follow-up to 2023’s Don’t Stop the Music, in which he traced 40 years of pop history by offering bite-sized facts for every day from January 1^st to December 31^st, jumping randomly from year to year. I noted in my review for theartsdesk that Lewis was particularly strong on the Eighties, so I was pleased this sequel focuses on that decade, with a similar format, this time going month-by-month through the years that were perhaps the very peak of pop.

Joanna Pocock’s second full-length book, Greyhound, tells the story of a single journey made and remade. In 2006, after the death of her sister and several miscarriages, Pocock travelled 2,300 miles from Detroit to Los Angeles by bus. She replicates the trip seventeen years later, curious to see how the States have changed and hoping to catch sight of her former self: “A ragged person running away from loss.”

Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19^th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.

How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.

Spark’s first full-length book, Child of Light, reinterpreted the life of Mary Shelley by means of a novel two-part structure: half “Recollection” and half criticism. She went on to write several literary biographies and her fiction is populated by chroniclers, libellers, and legacy-obsessed pensioners.

Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.

Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18^th and 19^th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) and of later Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s increasingly unhinged approach to impartiality. Of course, similar sentences can be heard in cafés and pubs across the country, and on social media, and within our homes, as we struggle more and more to negotiate truth’s withering state.