According to Rosie Wilby, “breaking up and staying together are simply two sides of the same coin.
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood.
Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which was released in February 2021. Chauvo-Feminism is a non-fiction long-form essay in which Mills delves into the phenomenon of men who create a feminist public persona which does not translate into their private lives.
"Ugh, I just feel so fat today," the woman near me in the locker room says to her friend as they get dressed after their workout. I look over – discreetly, as one does – to catch a glimpse of the grimacing side of her face as she zips up a pair of close-fitting blue jeans over a barely rounded lower abdomen, hip bones evident under taut fabric.
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of France’s most important living authors.
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free".
Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible collection, scattered around several countries, reconstructed little by little but forever incomplete.
Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises performed by Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015 and then set aside to marinade in a desk drawer while the world fell apart. Moshfegh’s characters “zoom” and gallop, they feel “glued down” and lost: a neat array of overactive but introverted low-lives, possessed by a miscellany of sordid desires.
Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald’s first book following her incredibly successful memoir H is for Hawk in 2014, is an excellent collection of short pieces focused on the natural world. It’s wonderful to read a book on this subject, especially one by a woman writer, in a genre which (with notable exceptions like Kathleen Jamie) dominated by men. Macdonald has an anecdotal style, dense with information and delicately poetic.
