This is a terrible tale of decline. Long before the end of his life Truman Capote was detested by virtually everyone he knew. His closest friends and his lifelong enemies were finally united in their contemptuous dismissal of him as a little shit, a snake, or ‘that little toad’. Yet it had not always been […]
There is no nicer phrase than ‘I have written’, and none more awful, more sweaty-palmed dreadful, than ‘I am writing’. I should know. I have recently finished a book on which I have been working for an embarrassing number of years. Let’s say seven, because it sounds just about respectable and even slightly biblical in […]
Nowadays a pathologist can go through an entire career without ever seeing a case of murder by poisoning. Give or take the odd polonium infusion by Russian agents, it is extremely rare. Not so in the 19th century, the golden age of poisoning, when the low cost and easy availability of lethal amounts of arsenic, […]
Philip Womack’s novels have always woven classical legend with dark, compelling children’s fantasies set in the contemporary world. In The Double Axe he retreats fully into the dense shadows of classical antiquity to retell the Minotaur myth from the perspective of a teenage Cretan prince. This choice of subject has paid off richly. Prince Deucalion […]
Travis Mulhauser’s debut opens in the first person with a gutsy 16-year-old tomboy called Percy setting off in a Michigan blizzard to find her junkie mother, who has fallen off the wagon and gone missing. Percy is one of the two Sweetgirls of the title; the other is the neglected baby girl she finds wailing […]
Julia O’Faolain’s powerful short stories should be more widely read and more warmly appreciated. They offer the traditional pleasures of the genre in scene-setting and characterisation but are spiked with an eccentric humour that is particularly her own. Under the Rose, which brings together twenty stories selected by O’Faolain from four collections published between 1968 […]
Graham Swift’s new work, a slim novella plainly subtitled ‘A Romance’, is deceptive in its simplicity. By its closing pages, Mothering Sunday has attained a strange grace and power. The story is told through the eyes of Jane Fairchild, an orphan who goes into service with the Niven family at their Berkshire pile, Beechwood House, […]
The penultimate instalment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume ‘novel-cum-memoir’ My Struggle covers the fourteen years the author spent in Bergen, Norway’s second city, between 1988 and 2002. Knausgaard claims to remember ‘surprisingly little’ of that time, ‘a flash of recollection here, a flash of recollection there’, though this doesn’t stop him churning out over 650 […]
Anthony Quinn’s fifth novel is a character study set in southern England between 1945 and 1962. The two protagonists, Freya Wyley and Nancy Holdaway, meet in London on VE night. By the autumn, they are studying at Oxford, Freya intending to become a journalist, Nancy to write fiction. They are entangled with three men: Nat, […]
Like his earlier books A Heart So White and The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s fourteenth novel centres on marriage, mental cruelty and sexual transgression. It is set in Madrid in around 1980, in the midst of Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy. Juan, its narrator, works as an assistant to Eduardo Muriel, a famous film director who […]
‘Writers like to write about the things they like to think about,’ noted Martin Amis of the obsessive frequency with which Vladimir Nabokov’s work turned to a sexual fixation with adolescent girls. To which we might add that so much contemporary culture lingers pruriently over the abuse of young women that this choice of subject […]
A divorcee in her sixties named Rose travels to Almería to see a specialist, who may or may not be a quack, about a mystery ailment that may or may not be imagined. She is accompanied by her daughter, Sophie, who is stuck in a mid-twenties rut, suffering from a holy trinity of career limbo, sexual […]
Where do we go from modernism, dear reader? You might not want to go anywhere, which is perfectly fair enough. Or you might argue that ‘modernism’ is an arbitrary category, a taxonomical illusion – also, fair enough. It’s undeniable that the literary revolutions of the early 20th century – games with form and stream of […]
Harry Parker was a Rifleman and his extraordinary debut novel, Anatomy of a Soldier, lives up to the finest traditions of his regiment. Innovative, intelligent and powerfully effective, the Rifles have always been a proud breed apart from the rest of the British Army, noted for their conscious rejection of stylised, antiquarian tradition and their […]
To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March, PEN is focusing on the cases of two Iranians detained in violation of their right to free expression. Human rights activist and journalist Narges Mohammadi (LR, June 2012) was arrested on 5 May last year and has been charged with ‘spreading propaganda against the system’ and ‘gathering […]
Instead of observing wild animals for themselves, many humans today see them via the recordings of a small group of professionals whose job it is to capture them on film. Over the last fifty years, the equipment has become quieter and more mobile and the techniques have been honed to the point where we can […]
In April 1982 a young man walked into Friar Tuck’s Game Room in Illinois and began playing an arcade game called Berzerk. After fifteen minutes of intense button-mashing, he posted a new high score and collapsed. He had suffered a heart attack. One newspaper covered the story with the headline ‘Video Game Death’, the first […]
Daughterhood is the subject matter of Juliet Nicolson’s tense, highly personal and beautifully written book. Nicolson is a historian and the daughter of the writer Nigel Nicolson. She spent much of her childhood in the magical surroundings of Sissinghurst. In her foreword, she shows that she is alert to any charges that the people who […]
Sooner or later all critics of high standing feel compelled to justify what they do for a living. A O Scott, chief film critic for the New York Times, has written a full-length defence of his job that is notable for being entirely without polemic. Better Living Through Criticism is a book spooked and distracted […]
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk