book reviews and features
theartsdesk Q&A: Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, authors of 'Can Music Make You Sick?'
Saturday, 10 October 2020
Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking... Read more... |
Book extract: Snake by Erica Wright
Thursday, 08 October 2020
Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes,... Read more... |
Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmith
Wednesday, 07 October 2020
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard,... Read more... |
William Boyd: Trio review - private perils in 1968
Monday, 05 October 2020
William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and... Read more... |
John Lanchester: Reality, and Other Stories review - campfire spooks for the digital age
Wednesday, 30 September 2020
What do you do when your phone rings, but you know the person ringing isn’t alive? In many ways, the cleverly named Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of... Read more... |
Bob Woodward: Rage review - terror and tyranny in the White House
Tuesday, 29 September 2020
“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has... Read more... |
Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands review - a case of murder mind
Tuesday, 29 September 2020
Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises... Read more... |
Sudhir Hazareesingh: Black Spartacus review – the life, and thought, of the first black super-hero
Monday, 28 September 2020
The former slave, and coachman on a sugar plantation, began one of his early public proclamations in a typically defiant vein: “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name.” At that... Read more... |
Ian Williams: Reproduction review - a dazzling kaleidoscope of life's tragicomedy
Monday, 28 September 2020
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has... Read more... |
Emma Cline: Daddy review - scintillating short stories by the author of The Girls
Monday, 28 September 2020
The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story... Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Dealer's Choice, Donmar Warehouse review - fresh take o...
Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but...
theartsdesk Q&A: director Leonardo Van Dijl discusses hi...
"Julie's story takes place everywhere", says the writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl, whose psychological drama Julie Keeps Quiet has...
Album: Lael Neale - Altogether Stranger
Over its crisp 32 minutes and nine songs, Altogether Stranger embraces electropop, lo-fi terrain and gothic solo contemplation. By...
Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Stratford - Messina FC scores o...
Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic....
Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refuge
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters....
DVD/Blu-ray: All We Imagine as Light
All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary...
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Wigmore Hall review...
I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’...
Simon Boccanegra, Opera North review - ‘dramatic staging’ pr...
Opera North have recently pioneered a way of presenting some big works which they call “dramatic concert stagings”, performing in concert halls as...
Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...