book reviews and features
Gina Apostol: Insurrecto review – a treacherous archipelago of stories
Sunday, 14 July 2019
As in other countries born out of 19th-century uprisings against imperial power, the literary roots of the Philippines run deep. Executed by the Spanish in 1896, the novelist, poet and physician... Read more... |
CD - The Lost Words: Spell Songs
Sunday, 07 July 2019
Earlier this year, eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever... Read more... |
Svetlana Alexievich: Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories review - anything but childish
Sunday, 30 June 2019
Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with... Read more... |
Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous review – the new avant-garde
Sunday, 23 June 2019
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because... Read more... |
Cate Haste: Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler review - a racy life pacily narrated
Sunday, 16 June 2019
Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the greatest Jewish artists, Alma Mahler/Gropius/Werfel... Read more... |
Anthony B. Atkinson: Measuring Poverty Around the World review - first, second and third world problems
Sunday, 09 June 2019
Five years ago, when the world was still reeling from 2008 and Britain from the swinging axe of George Osborne, Thomas Piketty’s Capital was an unlikely bestseller. It was a book probably... Read more... |
Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad review - a Soviet national epic
Sunday, 02 June 2019
Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on... Read more... |
Hiromi Kawakami: The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino review - Don Juan as a salaryman
Sunday, 26 May 2019
My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That... Read more... |
Thomas Harris: Cari Mora review – mayhem in Miami
Sunday, 19 May 2019
This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road... Read more... |
Mike Jay: Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic review - multiple perspectives
Sunday, 12 May 2019
Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to... Read more... |
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I Fagiolini, Hollingworth, St Martin-in-the-Fields review -...
“Nobody likes a Messiah…”, deadpanned Robert Hollingworth, with the timing of a practised stand-up. After a pause, “…more than I do.” At...
Music Reissues Weekly: Chelsea - The Step-Forward Years
On 21 June 1977, listeners to John Peel’s radio show heard a song titled “Pretty Vacant.” It wasn’t a preview of the forthcoming Sex Pistols...
Please Don't Destroy: Treasure of Foggy Mountain review...
Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch...
Wonka review - a confusingly mixed bag of bonbons
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages...
Smyrna review - Greece at twilight
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject...
The Peasants review - earthbound animation
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts...
Mathias Énard: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers'...
"Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief", wrote Amy Levy, "it is only when we come face to face with it that we find...
Album: Samara Joy - A Joyful Holiday
This six-track EP on Verve/UMG brings the breakthrough year of 2023 for Samara Joy to a neat close. In February she won two Grammys, as Best New...
Monica review - sombre American drama
There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and...