For two or three years I have used We Don’t Live Here Anymore, a previous collection of Andre Dubus’s novellas, as a short cut to discovering which of my friends have any intrinsic worth as human beings. It says much for Dubus (and for my own impeccable good taste, in both friends and literature) that […]
Margaret Atwood is a virtuoso of the key change, and her range of key is nowhere better demonstrated than in her short stories. At one level, the changes arc effected through shifts of vocabulary: in each story the language of the protagonist – an adolescent, a political activist, a housewife suppressing anxiety through facetiousness – […]
I was telling my friend Moon Biglow the other day that I was going to Hampstead to see some literary people. ‘Oh, littery people,’ said Moon – because that’s how he talks. ‘Oh, Hampstead!’ said Moon. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going to read a story to illustrate the Uprise of my Downfall.’ Moon turned a […]
Ben Okri, in addition to providing one of the most haunting and evocative titles of this year, has a sure hand with his chosen genre, the short story. Not a word is wasted, not a phrase out of place. His sparse, economical style is put to work on a landscape rich in horror and oozing […]
Epigraphs are wonderful things. For her second collection of stories, the American author Elizabeth Tallent has looked to Edna O’Brien: ‘They chopped the wood, they lit the stove, they kept busy; there is always something to do in a house.’ It is true, of course; and indeed there is always something to do in the […]
Fairy tales are a curious genre of literature. Their origins float around in an unfathomable past ravelled up in one another like the tangled roots of water vegetation. Their contents are equally inextricable: ‘There was and there was not a time’, Angela Carter tells us, is the invariable opening of Armenian fairy tales – […]
Modern Chinese literature is not in a particularly robust phase at the moment, but if you complain about this to an educated Chinese you will be told that, artistically, things haven’t been the same since the Tang Dynasty (618–907). That by common consent was the high point of Chinese culture. Mao Zedong was especially fond […]
There are eleven pieces in this book, and at least two of them are triumphs; perhaps to ask for any more would be greedy. London, Eastbourne, unnamed suburbs are the territory; the emotional territory is that of wilful, self-conscious eccentricity, and of loneliness – whether in a child, as in All the Pubs in Soho; […]
What sort of audience do Mars-Jones and White have in mind for this collection of short stories concerning themselves with gay lifestyles during the AIDS epidemic: gay men, who for the most part hardly need to be told , or ‘straights’, who, prurient or sympathetic attitudes aside, probably do not want to be told anyway? […]
According to a little note printed at the back of The Widow and the Parrot, Quentin Bell and his brother commissioned the piece from their Aunt Virginia for publication in the family newspaper the two young boys put together daily with the typically feverish intellectual energy of the Bloomsbury Child. ‘I know she was an […]
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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