book reviews and features
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history
Saturday, 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... Read more... |
Nicole Flattery: Nothing Special review - returning to the Factory
Wednesday, 08 March 2023
It seems that Andy Warhol’s Factory – silver-dusted and populated with tragic, drug-addicted minor... Read more... |
Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have been
Saturday, 04 March 2023
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-... Read more... |
Disbelief - 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya) review - writing battle-lines
Thursday, 23 February 2023
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world... Read more... |
Sally Adee: We Are Electric review - currents that run through us all
Friday, 17 February 2023
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on... Read more... |
Extract: The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture by Andrew Mellor
Wednesday, 15 February 2023
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness:... Read more... |
'I let it emerge': an interview with Fiona Benson on the cusp of the TS Eliot Prize announcement
Friday, 20 January 2023
Fiona Benson’s new collection of poems, Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape, 2022), tries to capture those things that are always moving out of grasp. It does this through four sections: the first... Read more... |
Jaan Kross: A Book of Falsehoods review - plague, power and deception in 16th century Tallinn
Thursday, 05 January 2023
When the first volume of Estonian master Jaan Kross’s peerless historical trilogy first appeared in an English... Read more... |
Best of 2022: Books
Saturday, 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... Read more... |
10 Questions for writer and translator Saskia Vogel
Wednesday, 21 December 2022
Johanne Lykke Holm’s spellbinding novel Strega recounts one teen’s journey into womanhood.... 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.
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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...