Books
India Lewis
After a first read of the blurb for Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be forgiven for assuming that this is merely a gimmick.The book does what it says on the tin: each "chapter" begins with the next letter of the alphabet, with the content then roughly alphabetised within this, all of the sentences based on “half a million words from a decade’s worth of journals”. However, this book, written in her familiar, autobiographical style, flourishes against its constraints.Perhaps best known for writing about the decision of whether or not to become a parent (2018’s Motherhood), Heti Read more ...
Jack Barron
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries green. But if points mean prizes, prizes also mean points, and point-scoring is a dubious means to judge a poet. While such institutions do much for the general reach and popularity of poetry, and though it’s always nice to be appreciated, you’d do better on the page than the awards stage if you want to get a proper sense of a poet’s interest in the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
One day in the early 90s I accepted the offer of a lift from a friend to a university open day I hadn’t been planning to go to. I ended up attending that university and there met my wife, and if I hadn’t done that my life would have been very different, and my children wouldn’t have been born. And this is of course true back through the chain of my ancestors – back hundreds of generations: each of them had to meet in order for me to be here.Brian Klaas’s Fluke is all about the millions of contingent coincidences that make up our lives, and poses the question: “If you could rewind your life to Read more ...
Lia Rockey
Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously proclaiming truly never-before-seen revelations – I suggest patience. Schoch is aware of the balance that writing this kind of book demands. He also has the sort of well-oiled experience that reassures us of a pair of safe hands. There’s a sweet spot that must be struck when writing a Shakespeare book, one between nicheness and accessibility, Read more ...
Alice Brewer
2023 was a good year for Andy Warhol post-mortems: after Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, after Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Home, Richard Dorment’s Warhol After Warhol.Their publication journeys undoubtedly benefitted from the value Anglophone cultural programming currently puts upon "pre-awareness": bookshops, for instance, are full of feminist and queer retellings of well-known novels and myths; the highest-grossing film of last year was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the first of many films that the toy company Mattel intends to eke out of its intellectual property.For Warhol scholars, it is Read more ...
theartsdesk
From wandering Rachmaninoff to Ulysses tribute, or a poet’s boyhood in Dundee to sleeplessness and arboreal inner lives, our reviewers share their literary picks from 2023.Prototype Press continues to publish much of the most interesting British fiction; alongside Jen Calleja’s Vehicle, a particular favourite of mine was Helen Palmer’s Pleasure Beach (Prototype, £12). Set in Blackpool on the 16th June 1999, the novel is a homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): the homosocial dynamic between Daedelus and Bloom is swapped for two women trying to remember if they slept together at a party the Read more ...
Pip Adam
I know it rattles me, so I try to prepare for it. But I am never fully prepared for the noise.The correctional facilities I have visited over the last 30 years are noisy places. A secure building requires strong doors that are opened and shut – always with the noise of a heavy door returning to its frame but often with a loud buzz or beep. This airlock design creates smaller areas which offer constant opportunity for echo. Prisons are overpopulated and a lot of people make a lot of noise. In my experience, unhappy or upset people make more noise, but laughter and excitement and care can also Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine, February 2022”, Angela Leighton writes, “Today’s my birthday. Many happy returns. / Elsewhere there’s shot, mortar shells, grenades.”The technical term for this is poetic licence because Leighton’s birthday falls on 23rd February, and Russia’s invasion of that particular "elsewhere" didn’t happen until the following day. Strictly speaking, the poem can’t be true. Leighton’s birthday was as quiet and uneventful in Ukraine as it was anywhere else.One of the strengths, however, of Angela Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
"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 the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new". In Mathias Énard’s sprawling, massy, magisterial tales of death and life, and love, this sense of endless decay and rebirth assumes many faces, only some of them cruel.The novel begins conventionally enough. We are introduced to the rather petulant, yet self-mocking voice of our protagonist and hapless anthropologist, David Mazon, via the form of his " Read more ...
Lucy Thynne
Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will only have one story […] you’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’ The advice might sound reductive – as though every writer is a kind of one-trick pony – but it’s meant to be reassuring, to legitimate a writer as a creature of obsession and habit. Anne Michaels’ third and most recent novel, Held, is not about the Holocaust, as her debut, Fugitive Pieces, was, but in its themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, we see her Read more ...
Leila Greening
School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are richly luminescent, never cold or monochromatic.However, criticism of this opulence, a style described by Carol Rumens as "sea-lit", disintegrates when the radiance of lines like "the cherry-magnified boy who felt keenly fractures in / his bones clicking like wings" appear. Hutchinson marries words emphatically, with a constant attention to music. His Read more ...
Alice Brewer
Self-described ‘intermittent poet’ and 2023 Turner Prize-nominee Jesse Darling said this in a recent interview for Art Review: ‘I think about modernity as a fairytale’. The comparison is made in reference to capitalism’s beginnings, as continuous as they are ill-defined: ‘It’s a thoroughly arbitrary and weird situation that starts with the first colonial excursions in the 1700s – depending on where you begin – or the Inclosure Acts, and goes all the way up to now.’Paraphrasing an encounter with Darling’s sculptures, I would hedge my bets and add to fairytale the words romance, and maybe Read more ...