sat 07/12/2024

memoir

Sophia Giovannitti: Working Girl - On Selling Art and Selling Sex review - portrait of the artist as sex worker

Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.”I nearly – mentally – tweak that sentence to read “of conventional types...

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Susan Finlay: The Lives of the Artists review - the knotted threads of memoir and art

Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life (1728) is not the artist-biography to which Susan Finlay’s The Lives of the Artists pays its most obvious homage, but it appears to have followed its advice. All men of achievement and honesty, Cellini argues, "should...

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Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes

On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.Masud is, amongst other...

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Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story

Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book of short stories in three parts, Old Babes in the Wood. These tales are engaging, but, as is frequently the case with short story...

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Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history

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 won a devoted readership. Yet she began her career as a kind...

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Best of 2022: Books

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 their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz...

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Patti Smith: A Book of Days review - adding to Insta's debris

On April Fool’s Day, in 1978, the godmother of American punk, Patti Smith, jumped offstage at the Rainbow Theatre in London halfway through a version of “The Kids Are Alright” and started dancing in the crowd. Her vertiginous feat was also a leap of...

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Derek Owusu: Losing the Plot review - the finest perfume

Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018)...

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Phoebe Power: Book of Days review - the clack of walking poles, the clink of scallop shell

The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a...

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Scholastique Mukasonga: The Barefoot Woman review - remembering Rwanda before 1994

To read Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir, The Barefoot Woman, beautifully translated from the French by Jordan Stump, is to see simultaneously through the eyes of a woman and a child.The mother, the industrious and ingenious Stefania, watches her...

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Extract: Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn began his translation of Jamás el fuego nunca, a novel by experimental Chilean artist Diamela Eltit, in January 2021. Considering the careful, difficult but not impossible “craft” of translation as he worked, Hahn kept a diary,...

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Extract: Where My Feet Fall - Going For A Walk in Twenty Stories

I began work on Where My Feet Fall a few months into the pandemic of 2020. After lockdown was announced we all became better walkers, and the collection took on greater resonance.The writers I selected were invited to do one of two things – recall a...

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