Patricia Duncker
Blues & Beowulf
Mud: Stories of Sex and Love
By Michèle Roberts
Virago 226pp £13.99
Short stories are never safe spaces. The form puts the reader at risk. There are no back stories, and no gentle, unfolding explanations and descriptions, which are the novel’s comfort zones. Good short stories should always feel like shock encounters, whatever the outcome. The reader is assaulted by the mood of the narrator; the voice appears from nowhere, beguiling, haranguing, accusing, weeping or melancholy, and the reader has no subplot in which to hide. In Michèle Roberts’s new collection, which contains more powerful, uncompromising writing than you will find in most novels, women’s sexual consciousness and a radical perception of sexual difference hold centre stage.
These tales inhabit and dramatise the classic territory of Roberts’s work: the drama of sex in all its forms, brutal and tender; the sensual pleasure of clothes, words, art and food; the writer’s identity; her love affair with France; and the process of writing. Roberts’s Catholic iconography is
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
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm