Nicola Long is a few years out of art school when she comes across an archive containing a dead sculptor’s letters to a friend. The sculptor, Donna, was about her age when she wrote them and in similar circumstances: broke, disenchanted but convinced – or determined to be convinced – that being a sculptor is […]
When The Second Coming was published in the United States in the spring, almost all critics agreed that it was too long. Garth Risk Hallberg has faced this charge before. When his first novel, the period epic City on Fire, came out in 2015, Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, decreed that it was, […]
Rebecca Watson possesses an uncanny ability to manipulate a reader’s gaze. The most immediately striking thing about both her debut novel, little scratch, and its successor, I Will Crash, is the corporeality of her language, the page becoming a stage. Indents and unconventional paragraph spacing force the eye to flick back and forth across the […]
‘The ball is round’, so the well-worn saying goes, ‘and the game lasts ninety minutes.’ Joseph O’Neill’s latest novel, Godwin, is ostensibly about football, but as he illustrates through the story, football isn’t even about football any more. It’s about labour and energy and capital flows across continents. It’s about resource extraction, commodity trading, human […]
Exhibit opens with the Korean–American photographer Jin Han, a former evangelical suffering from artist’s block, recounting a myth to Lidija Jung, another artist of Korean origin and injured principal ballet dancer. The two women meet at a party in the hills outside San Francisco and stay up talking through the night. Jin confides in Lidija […]
To see the most mundane of their experiences, relationships and idle thoughts as material is what writers do. Writers, indeed artists of all stripes, do not merely live their day-to-day existence but treat it as the raw stuff of life, to be shaped into art. Or, as with the trainee stand-up comics depicted in Camille […]
A few years ago, a movement called #NousToutes staged a series of night-time guerrilla actions in Paris and began changing street names. Below the original plaque they posted one of an identical design that gave the name and date of a woman’s death. The inscription often added ‘murdered by a “compagnon” or “conjoint” or “ex-conjoint”’. The effect on passers-by like me was sobering and eye-opening. There were so many.
Reading the opening of Rosarita kindled a memory within me. A stranger once turned to me in the street and said, ‘I knew your mother when she lived here. She was beautiful.’ I could almost sense my young, long-buried mother coming up the hill behind me. Irrelevant to the story? Perhaps, but something similar may […]
Early on in Munir Hachemi’s Living Things, we are presented with an apparently universal statement: ‘experience, we all know, is the sine qua non for creating literature’. The narrator, Munir (he shares the author’s name), is fixated on this idea, and it’s the desire to gain this ‘volatile, hazy, ill-defined thing’ that propels him and […]
It’s 9 November 2008. I’m an eighteen-year-old high-school senior meandering around Grant Park, the throbbing heart of my hometown of Chicago. Tens of thousands of people chatter, chew lips, squirm. A dozen elderly black women beside me hold hands, close their eyes and pray. The whole world is watching us as we await the impossible. […]
Tom Lamont’s protagonist, Téo, doesn’t choose to go home; rather, he has home thrust upon him. At first he intends merely to visit Vic, his ailing father, in Enfield, but when Lia, his childhood crush, dies, he agrees to look after her son, Joel. Leaving his own life in east London and his hard-won independence, […]
Fantasy benders. This is what the unnamed protagonist of Miranda July’s second novel, All Fours, calls her mental flights into weird, funny and often erotic alternate realities. ‘You can’t have everything you want, but you can want everything you want’, another woman tells her when she describes all this unsatisfied desire roiling inside her. She […]
Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction has long been haunted by lonely women. ‘I took the bus alone,’ recalls Tsukiko, the narrator of her prize-winning novel Strange Weather in Tokyo (2001), ‘I walked around the city alone, I did my shopping alone, and I drank alone.’ The story portrays the solace Tsukiko finds in the unlikely bond she […]
The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry’s first novel in five years, opens in Butte, Montana. It is the last decade of the 19th century and Butte, having been established as a mining camp in 1864, is now on the cusp of becoming one of the largest industrial cities in the American West. As with most boom towns of the period, its growth has been characterised by a furious influx of hopeful prospectors from across the globe, all of whom have little choice but to collide – in a simmering, spitting brew of class and culture
Have you heard the joke about the Irish boomerang? The funny thing about the Irish boomerang, the saying goes, is that it never comes back. It just spends all of its time singing songs about how it wishes one day it could. The diasporic experience is built into Irish identity. To be Irish is to […]
Butcher, Joyce Carol Oates’s sixty-forth novel, is ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, the ‘Red-Handed Butcher’ to others. A 19th-century doctor at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, Weir devotes himself to the study and experimental treatment of female maladies that nobody else wants to address. But it’s also […]
I will only briefly summarize the plot since it is of small relevance to the nature, or stature, of this work. We are told, in the drunken soliloquy of a fifty-year-old electrical engineer, that he was the son of a Marx-fearing, collier father and dour mother, that he was clever, won a place at Glasgow […]
Honor Levy shot to quasi-fame in 2020 when the New Yorker published ‘Good Boys’, which is less a short story than a hysterical collection of fragments. The central premise is that boys call girls bitches, but only some girls. The narrator is desperate not to be one of these. The story culminates in a skilful […]
For Andrew O’Hagan, King’s Cross is more than just a place. In 1997, he reported on the area for The Guardian and evoked a site of contrasts: new sleek glass buildings, vulnerable people buying drugs outside the station, Tony Blair’s children on their way to school, homeless boys in sleeping bags being moved on by […]
It is only May, but Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time might well be the loudest debut of the year. The author, a young British-Cambodian writer and editor, has won prizes for her short stories, including the V S Pritchett Award, and been named one of The Observer’s best new novelists of 2024. The novel […]
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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