memoir
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal historySaturday, 11 March 2023
For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions won a devoted readership. Yet she began her career as a kind... Read more... |
Best of 2022: BooksSaturday, 31 December 2022
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... Read more... |
Patti Smith: A Book of Days review - adding to Insta's debrisWednesday, 23 November 2022
On April Fool’s Day, in 1978, the godmother of American punk, Patti Smith, jumped offstage at the Rainbow Theatre in London halfway through a version of “The Kids Are Alright” and started dancing in the crowd. Her vertiginous feat was also a leap of... Read more... |
Derek Owusu: Losing the Plot review - the finest perfumeThursday, 10 November 2022
Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018)... Read more... |
Phoebe Power: Book of Days review - the clack of walking poles, the clink of scallop shellTuesday, 26 July 2022
The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a... Read more... |
Scholastique Mukasonga: The Barefoot Woman review - remembering Rwanda before 1994Thursday, 14 April 2022
To read Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir, The Barefoot Woman, beautifully translated from the French by Jordan Stump, is to see simultaneously through the eyes of a woman and a child.The mother, the industrious and ingenious Stefania, watches her... Read more... |
Extract: Catching Fire by Daniel HahnTuesday, 12 April 2022
Daniel Hahn began his translation of Jamás el fuego nunca, a novel by experimental Chilean artist Diamela Eltit, in January 2021. Considering the careful, difficult but not impossible “craft” of translation as he worked, Hahn kept a diary,... Read more... |
Extract: Where My Feet Fall - Going For A Walk in Twenty StoriesTuesday, 29 March 2022
I began work on Where My Feet Fall a few months into the pandemic of 2020. After lockdown was announced we all became better walkers, and the collection took on greater resonance.The writers I selected were invited to do one of two things – recall a... Read more... |
Marianne Eloise: Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking review - bargaining with the devilWednesday, 23 March 2022
No mental health condition has become quite as kitsch as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its tacky shorthands – the hand washing, the germaphobia, the clean freaks – have made their way into everything, from Buzzfeed listicles to The Big Bang Theory... Read more... |
Album: Elvis Costello and the Imposters - The Boy Named IfSaturday, 15 January 2022
There is a sense in which Elvis Costello emerged as a recording artist fully grown, with that unique vocal mix of vulnerability and insolence, savvy and often brilliant lyrics. Although he has never stopped experimenting, always with the logic of a... Read more... |
Peggy For You, Hampstead Theatre review - comedic gold, and a splinter of ice, from Tamsin GreigTuesday, 21 December 2021
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?... Read more... |
Marcin Wicha: Things I Didn’t Throw Out review - the stories told by stacks of stuffTuesday, 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 for shopping. Only once did she refer to her passing,... Read more... |
