Books
Jessica Payn
Amina Cain is a writer of near-naked spaces and roomy characters. Her debut collection of short fiction, I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009), located itself in the potential strangeness of everyday thoughts and experience. Her second, Creature (Dorothy, 2013), was likewise interested in the weirdness of being in the world. Indelicacy is her first novel: a slim, lucidly imagined account of a cleaner who is captivated by the paintings at the art museum where she works, and by the idea of writing about herself looking at them. In an undefined past and place, Vitória’s lot changes Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) had much more than an astonishingly powerful voice. It may already be almost a hundred years since she made her most significant recordings – she is from an era before amplification – and yet her unfailing capacity to hold the listener’s attention, to tell stories that sound deeply rooted in her own personal experience still hits home every time.In this time when grieving is all around us, we can sometimes lose any sense of what is real and what is dreamt, and the immediacy of a song like “Graveyard Dream Blues” in which Bessie Smith imagines she is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is a novel, says Patricia Lockwood in her Twitter feed, about being very inside the internet and then being very outside of it. At first, I thought the title referred to aspects of the internet and its disappearing history, as in, “'MySpace was an entire life’, she nearly wept at a bookstore in Chicago… ‘And it is lost, lost, lost.’”I started to think about the other lost things that no one talks about now: Compuserve, Netscape, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, all those pre-Google search engines, and the world before the iPhone, when the idea of looking up the name of an actor you’d forgotten as Read more ...
James Dowsett
CLR James came to London from Trinidad in 1932, clutching the manuscript of his first and only novel. He soon found work, writing about cricket for the Manchester Guardian, as well as a political faith, revolutionary Trotskyism, which would inspire him to set aside his literary ambitions for political activism. James would instead make his name as one of the finest intellectuals of the 20th century. The Black Jacobins, his pioneering study of the Haitian Revolution, led by the charismatic, ex-slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, became a ground-breaking work of black history.Minty Alley is ultimately Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Straight off the bat, Tabitha Lasley’s soon-to-be ex-boss points out the fatal flaw in her life-changing project. Jettisoning her job at a women’s magazine, a long-term boyfriend, a cramped London flat (after it’s broken into) and friends in her mid-30s, Lasley heads to an austere Aberdeen to find out with her own eyes and ears what oil-riggers get up to when they’re “on” and “off”, that is, offshore and on-land. What she discovers about the latter is perhaps unsurprising: they drink (gallons) and/or find a mistress; something Lasley learns firsthand. She falls for Caden from Stockton ( Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
On 25 November 1944, a German V2 rocket struck the Woolworths store in New Cross at Saturday lunchtime. It killed 168 people. Francis Spufford’s second novel begins with this “hairline crack” in existence; a mere nanosecond of high-explosive combustion, “measurably tiny, immeasurably vast”. In a matter-dissolving flash, it closes the book of time for five of the small children in the shop. What, Light Perpetual asks, if that particular V2 had not fallen there and then; if “some other version of the reel of time” had played, and that handful of kids had lived into “All the would-be’s, Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Burglar alarms jangled through the empty hallways of Paradise Block.” In this ramshackle, lonely tenement, such alarms might be one’s only company. Yet, in this intricate collection of short stories, the inhabitants’ lives intertwine. Alice Ash’s debut collection steadily follows the tropes typical of the short story, but the tales overlap, creating a compendium that almost morphs into a novel but retains the unsettling gaps crucial to the genre.Of course, stories collated together in one place often share themes or ideas, but Ash takes this further, picking up characters and motifs from one Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I suspect that the work of James Baldwin is not all that familiar to readers in Britain, perhaps not even to black readers in Britain – just as, for a time at least, it seemed that Martin Luther King, a much more visible figure in black history whose words are routinely quoted, became obscured by rather blingier modern-day figures.Yet, as a number of commentators have noted, Baldwin is the figure we need to turn to in the age of Trump, the man who long ago told us that “It is certain… that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." Amen to that. The film Read more ...
India Lewis
In Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic's third book, everything is purposeful, each loaded gun introduced just waiting to go off. It has something of the lightness of Rachel Cusk, but is loaded with the weight of Balkan history which cannot be suppressed. As the book progresses, it evolves and twists, each certainty shifting and dropping out of sight.Asylum Road begins melodramatically, with the banal act of listening to true crime podcasts dripping with potential violence. Anya (the protagonist and narrator for all but a small section of the book) and her boyfriend, Luke Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
One of the finer episodes in Raven Leilani’s startling debut (which contains an embarrassment of fine episodes) comes about halfway through, when Edie, our young, struggling black narrator, starts working as a rider for a “popular in-app delivery service”. The gig gives her tantalisingly brief contact with a spectrum of outlandish New Yorkers and their equally peculiar needs. Here is a snippet of her survey of this garden of late capitalist delights:A vial of rosewater for a customer in Greenwich Village whose labradoodle humps me down the stairs. Band-Aids and cigarillos for a customer who Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures is a collection of transcripts, recording weekly group lectures delivered by Mark Fisher to his students at Goldsmiths, University of London during the 2016/17 academic year. These lectures provide the substance of a module of the same name, taught within the university’s then-newly formed MA in Contemporary Art Theory. In his capacity as a lecturer, Fisher coaxes his students through the questions explored and raised by the concept of postcapitalist desire, described as the “shadow” to the ideas explored in-depth in Fisher’s earlier, Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
You go out for a walk and leave your devices at home; your head feels a little bit clearer. But when you get back and plonk yourself in front of a screen, has anything really changed? Our unhealthy, deliberately engineered dependence on technology, together with the corresponding virtualisation of our bodies, form the crux of Julia Bell’s concise essay Radical Attention. But the book left me doubting whether there is any true escape from the “meatspace” of split minds.Radical Attention gives us some poignant examples of the impact of technology – consequences we are probably aware Read more ...