David Profumo
Caught and Released
‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted as being essentially ‘about’ something more profound. There’s only so much room for stuff about inner rivers, rites of passage or the inevitable pèlerinage de l’âme, and if you can’t manage metaphor and insight like Norman Maclean or Tom McGuane then you’ll end up merely plumbing the shallows.
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
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings