Books
Boyd Tonkin
In the late 1950s, a photo technician from Salford suddenly became “the most famous teenager in Britain”. Shelagh Delaney was 19 when she sent the script of A Taste of Honey to the radical director Joan Littlewood. Within a matter of weeks, in May 1958, Theatre Royal Stratford East had staged it – sensationally, to a welcome that mixed bouquets and brickbats. The fearless youngster from the cosmopolitan slum neighbourhood of Ordsall had already begun “to change the way working-class women are treated and represented in Britain”. With its two generations of single mothers, its relaxed Read more ...
India Lewis
Karl Marlantes’s Deep River is an all-American novel. And why should it not be? Marlantes is an all-American author. He grew up in small-town Oregon, attended Yale (and Oxford), fought and was heavily awarded as a Marine in Vietnam, then settled down to convert his experiences into the well-received Matterhorn and What It Is Like To Go To War. In Deep River, he returns to his childhood to tell the story of his Finnish heritage, loosely basing it on The Kalevala, a collection of tales gathered together in the 19th century into one epic poem by Elias Lönnrot. This explanation, which comes at Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The trend-hopping taste-makers who run British literary publishing have lately decided that “working-class” writing merits a small dole of their precious time and cash. To assess how long this latest patronising fad may last, check out the availability of James Kelman’s fiction: three decades of ground-breaking modernist work by a scrupulous innovator, now all but buried by Penguin, and largely consigned (a couple of titles apart) to second-hand limbo. Born in Liverpool, long settled in his homeland of Wales, Niall Griffiths has, like Kelman, crafted a sophisticated literary voice for the Read more ...
Sarah Collins
Many of the women in this pioneering collection of essays have faced unimaginable hardship in their pursuit of truth – persecution by extremist groups as well as the loss of family members and friends. The tone of this collection is, however, best captured by Amira Al Sharif’s photograph of laundry hanging out to dry across a grocer's family home which has been damaged in a coalition bombing in Yemen. “You can destroy our homes, but the Yemenis will still do laundry,” she writes – ordinary life will continue in the face of terrible circumstances.The essays are grouped around loose themes: Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Jeanne – employment, age and appearance unknown, motives unknowable – is building a collection of penises. In street after street, she feigns dizziness; on the inevitable approach of a man eager to lend his help, she leads him to a hotel room. After the encounter, she does not retain any recollection of this man’s face, body or name; in the intricate interior of her memory palace, only the textured details of the penis, the "shape, the form, the particular warmth, the density, the smell", are carefully preserved. She is the protagonist of Nina Leger’s provocative novel which imagines the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Of all the ventures that super-fraudster Anna Delvey might have chosen as bait for her victims, an exclusive art club was surely a masterstroke. Self regard, cunning, greed and snobbery have never been in short supply in the art world, but in the aftermath of the 2012 revelation that New York’s venerable Knoedler Gallery had knowingly been dealing forgeries for more than 20 years, Anna Delvey (real name, Anna Sorokin) was just one more fake in a business awash with them.Delvey arrived in New York in 2014, inserting herself into the city’s most fashionable and wealthy circles, where she passed Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Swedish-born multi-lingual academic Martin Hägglund lives in New York and teaches philosophy and comparative literature at Yale. His new book, This Life, is a substantial examination of secular faith in contrast to religious faith.He defines secular faith as devotion to life as it is lived, with all its uncertainties, joys and loss. His argument is the opposite of strident. Rather, it is a heartfelt and radical take on the notion of faith. Hägglund presupposes that to think of life as finite is itself a faith; death is the background against which life appears.Hägglund accepts life as finite Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In cricket, timing is everything. Played a fraction early and that silky cover drive finds a batsman out to lunch as the ball cannons into his stumps. Too late and it dribbles uselessly to mid-off.Ex-cricketer turned journalist Vic Marks has made it his business to be in the right place at the right time. First as a mean spin bowler, sharing a Somerset dressing room with Botham, Richards, Roebuck and Garner, perhaps the most outrageously talented side in county cricket’s history. Then as a tidy presence in England’s one-day side of the 1980s, facing up to the West Indies and Australia. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 José Rizal remains the adored hero of his archipelago’s struggle for independence. Yet this legacy of authored nationhood has not helped Filipino writers much in their quest to have their stories heard abroad. Later subjection to the United States – overtly colonial rule from 1901 to 1946, followed by military, economic and cultural hegemony – has meant that the few works that do reach an Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Earlier this year, eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux – set about working with the ‘spell songs’ of nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the images from nature of artist Jackie Morris, and recorded what they created at Rockfield studios, then performed four sell-out shows to standing ovations in February. At these shows, Morris would create new images live on stage as the musicians played. Next weekend, they return to Folk By The Oak, the one-day festival in Hertfordshire, and the patron of the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with Soviet and post-Soviet citizens who were children during the second world war. They recount strange and terrible experiences which — even as adults — retain the force and candour of childhood memory.Unsurprisingly, many coalesce around abstract, sensory features which, along with spare brutal episodes, attest to deep sadness and thinned living. “What has stayed in my memory is colour,” says Lenya Khosenvich — a common admission. Faina Lyutsko remembers how “The death Read more ...
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because, when she was five, her schoolhouse was burnt to the ground in an American napalm raid. “Our mother tongue, then,” writes Vuong, is the “mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”Vuong, whose debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988 and emigrated with his mother and grandmother to Hartford, Connecticut via a Read more ...