book reviews and features
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Sunday, 01 December 2024
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com. It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and... Read more... |
Interview: rising star Chloe Savage on the Arctic, outer space, and igniting children's wonder for the unknown
Thursday, 21 November 2024
How old were you when you first had an image of the Arctic? When you first had that image, what was it that most resonated? Was it its remoteness, the endless snow and ice, the polar bears? Did it... Read more... |
Jon Fosse: Morning and Evening review - after thoughts
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive... Read more... |
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More review - fuel for thought
Thursday, 07 November 2024
If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come... Read more... |
Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings review - a gift that keeps on giving
Monday, 04 November 2024
In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and... Read more... |
Jonathan Coe: The Proof of My Innocence review - a whodunnit with a difference
Tuesday, 29 October 2024
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema
Tuesday, 22 October 2024
You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-... Read more... |
Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid prose
Tuesday, 22 October 2024
In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected... Read more... |
Stevie Smith: Not Waving But Drowning review - riding the wave
Wednesday, 02 October 2024
Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, Faber &... Read more... |
Ellen McWilliams: Resting Places - On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution review - finding art in the inarticulable
Friday, 19 July 2024
How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a... Read more... |
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latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Music Reissues Weekly: Stefan Gnyś - Horizoning
For most of Canada’s listening public, their country-man Stefan Gnyś – pronounced G'neesh – wasn’t a concern. The 300 copies of his 1969 single...
Wicked review - overly busy if beautifully sung cliffhanger
"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later...
Akram Khan, GIGENIS, Sadler’s Wells review - now 50, Khan re...
London-born Akram Khan has come a long way in a 35-year career. He performed as a young teen in Peter Brook’s production of The ...
Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director...
Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of...
King James, Hampstead Theatre review - UK premiere drains a...
Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not...
Album: Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More
The progress of Kim Deal has been one of the great delights of modern music. Much as one wishes Pixies well, they have never been the same without...
Kavakos, Philharmonia, Blomstedt, RFH review - a supreme val...
From a privileged position in the Festival Hall stalls, I could see 97-year old Herbert Blomstedt’s near-immobile back as he sat on a piano stool...
Hannah Scott, Worthing Pavilion Theatre Atrium review - fill...
London-based singer-songwriter Hannah Scott has warned her next song may reduce us to tears. It is, she says, inspired by events following the...