memoir
India Lewis
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 collections, they don’t always hang together well.There is a poignantly autobiographical element to many of the stories. The first and third sections centre on the lives of an elderly couple, Nell and Tig, then Nell’s solitary existence after the death of Tig. Atwood lost her own husband – the Canadian author Graeme Gibson – in 2019. Like Tig, Gibson Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
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 of hack, writing magazine fillers about shopping and design.No doubt these routine weekly assignments, and later a photography column, helped her to develop the keen eye for detail that she brought to long-form journalism. In countless articles and a dozen genre-bending non-fiction books, including In the Freud Archives (1984), The Journalist and Read more ...
theartsdesk
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 Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
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 the imagination, a typical punk act that seemed to collapse the distance between performer and audience.The kids were definitely all right with this sudden unexpected proximity to their idol – and I can say that because I was one of them. Indeed I remember being struck by the way her guitarist and collaborator Lenny Kaye seamlessly picked up the Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
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) answered, without hesitation, “the form” and Owusu’s “compression of poetic language”. Owusu’s latest work, Losing the Plot, imagines what life was like for his 18-year-old mother when she arrived in London from Ghana in 1989. His fictional narrator’s mother swaps the “dusty trails of Jamasi” for the grey pavement of Tottenham, “a village of disguised Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
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 sculptural pile of pebbles. Some of the shrines also sheltered a handwritten prayer or a crucifix; most had burnt-out tea-candles.Phoebe Powers imagined her debut poetry collection, Shrines of Upper Austria, “as a shrine: a gathering of objects, words and images important to someone, both as discrete objects and as a composition”. Her second poetry Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
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 children attentively, preparing them for any possible danger that might assail them in or out of the home. Her daughter, the young Mukasonga, is the faithful storyteller of her mama’s one-time magical griot, whose loving and ever-watchful gaze, much like her narrative, never strays from the resilient and resourceful mother before her. Their entwined Read more ...
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, describing the “discrete choices” made during the process of writing Never Did the Fire: an English version of Eltit’s original with Hahn’s “fingerprints” all over it.A record in real time of the translator’s pleasures and pitfalls, the diary is the first in Charco’s Untranslated Series. In the extract below, Hahn discusses how gender is encoded differently Read more ...
duncan.minshull
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 past journey or go on a new one. Not only did they willingly set off, but I discovered that many were skilled snappers, mappers and sketchers, or their families were. Vivid images would be added to their words, and here is a sneak preview of five of them. “Lost” by Joanna KavennaThe wind howled. I was asleep when someone tugged at my foot. I Read more ...
Annabel Bai Jackson
No mental health condition has become quite as kitsch as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its tacky shorthands – the hand washing, the germaphobia, the clean freaks – have made their way into everything, from Buzzfeed listicles to The Big Bang Theory. As for literature, there’s a gaping OCD-shaped hole. Depression gets William Styron’s Darkness Visible, psychosis Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. But the implicit cultural understanding of OCD as “quirk” has made it unworthy of literary treatment: insufficiently disturbing for trauma plots, and too specific to be a metaphor Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a sense in which Elvis Costello emerged as a recording artist fully grown, with that unique vocal mix of vulnerability and insolence, savvy and often brilliant lyrics. Although he has never stopped experimenting, always with the logic of a musical connoisseur, it was all there, one could say, with “Less Than Zero”, his timeless first single on Stiff.From the start, he was as comfortable with electrifying rock (see “Pump It Up”) as with heartfelt yet unsentimental love ballads (“Alison”). And he is in fabulous form on his new album The Boy Called If, a series of vignettes in which he Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?That the stories relating to her professional life – the personal life was kept much more off limits – around her celebrated office off St Martin’s Lane, up those flights of stairs, have lived on is due not least to Alan Plater’s 1999 drama Peggy For You in which he (one of the hundreds of writers on Ramsay’s roster, of course) imagines a day in the Read more ...