literature
India Lewis
I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it seemed, at first glance, to be an over-intellectualised prose-cum-poetical text about a mountain lion.But the novel was so much more: an odd but wryly astute social commentary from an animal that has been forced to move from nature to where the humans are – and he doesn’t wholly hate it. It’s also (loosely) based on the famous P-22 mountain lion, who also lived in LA, and whose story at times intersects with that of the protagonist of Open Throat.The lion, whose name, we are told, is Read more ...
Marc Burrows
In a very real sense, Terry Pratchett taught me how to write. I first came across his work when I was 12 years old, in the early 90s.My parents had been given copies of two of the earliest books in his Discworld series, Guards! Guards! and The Colour of Magic, by a bloke down the pub – which is how you’re supposed to get Discworld books – and, knowing that I was an utter nerd with a preposterously overactive imagination and a love of silly humour, passed them down to me.I loved them from the word go, and not just because there’s (unusually for Pratchett) swearing in the opening pages of both Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of contemporary puppetry is its ability to skew our perception of reality so entirely that our senses become more heightened as we wait with meta-awareness in excited anticipation for what comes next – whether we know the story or not.On the stage of the Brighton Theatre Royal, giant figures become small objects, perspective is tipped on its side as we try to untangle the complexities of who is real and what is constructed. It is a delicious metaphorical tangle that parallels the book’s key themes.We are thrown into the infamous tale with some of its Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was more important than artistic form. The 20th-century Russian-Ukrainian writer A. Anatoli, who renounced his Soviet identity (and surname Kuznetsov) after defecting to England in 1969, was unquestionably an artist.Yet he chose to subtitle Babi Yar, his classic non-fiction account of Ukraine's holocaust, "a document in the form of a novel". The book, first published in a heavily censored xxx in 1966, poses the question: why and how did the unprecedented Read more ...
India Lewis
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it has flavours of the realism of her countryman, Karl Ove Knaussgard, more than a hint of emotional American big hitters like Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, and something of the twists and turns of a chronicle like War and Peace.The novel begins with Martin Berg, a Gothenburg publisher, enigmatic and adrift in a sea of papers. We then cut to his daily life at an unknown point in time, from which the Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat.Lecturing a teenage coven on the art of sorcery and how to tap into the powers of the “Unseen world”, Tu Tu (also known as "The Master", in just one of Madsen’s many playful nods to Mikhail Bulgakov) swings from chandeliers, drinks champagne, plays the bongos and an electro-acoustic harp, and waltzes around a Gothic Revival mansion in a diamanté collar.Yet you’d be mistaken for thinking he’s a beneficent magical moggy akin to those found in a Read more ...
Jack Barron
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted RENDANG in 2020), is a brief but telling prelude, an as-if translated from Russian into English:There stands the stump; with foreign voices otherwillows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.ANNA AKHMATOVA, “Willow” (trans. JENNIFER REESER)These three lines work both as the book’s framing device and its recurrent textual spectre: like Akhmatova, Harris Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world – and not only in rising food and energy prices. Yet its repercussions in Russia were silenced or at least muffled by state censorship of the media and by the clampdown on dissent.Russian friends living in this alternative reality tell me that only a small minority actually believes the Kremlin’s propaganda. Helpless or uncomprehending, most people try to block out the war and get on with day-to-day Read more ...
Jack Barron
Fiona Benson’s new collection of poems, Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape, 2022), tries to capture those things that are always moving out of grasp. It does this through four sections: the first, “Insect Love Songs”, thrums with a lyric transience, zeroing-in on the minute and fleeting world of bugs, from mosquito to mayfly; “Boarding-School Tales” utters the difficult facts of childhood with sensitive recollection; in “Translations from Pasiphaë”, she retells the Minotaur myth, giving voice to Asterius’s mother and displaying the fraught, familial heart of the labyrinth; and the concluding section, “ Read more ...
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Identity is thorny business. This was the parting thought of Anna X, the play that marked Emma Corrin’s West End debut in the summer of 2021. The same credo governs Corrin’s return to London theatre with Orlando, in Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel about a larger-than-life character hellbent on defying time, sex, and convention.Once again, Corrin blazes on stage – and across the centuries – with a central performance that is both lucid and layered. It’s a shame, then, that Michael Grandage’s breezy production doesn’t quite make the most of that great asset, not to Read more ...
India Lewis
Cormac McCarthy’s first books in over a decade are coming out this year, a month apart from one another. The Passenger tells the story of deep-sea diver Bobby Western, desperately in love with his perfect, beautiful, wildly intelligent dead sister, Alicia. Then, Stella Maris is her story, named after the asylum to which she commits herself.The Passenger is classic McCarthy fare: totally abstruse, excellently descriptive, and frustratingly digressive. It has elements of many of his previous novels, the strongest being the narrative of the perpetually wandering anti-hero. Western is a very Read more ...