Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Gross and Slimy Place
Bet They'll Miss Us When We're Gone
By Marianne Wiggins
Secker & Warburg 176pp £13.99 order from our bookshop
The world on which Marianne Wiggins’s stories opens is a strange one, and not only because in one of them an anglophone angel issues a death threat to a non-English-speaking Spanish bird-fancier over a defunct telephone. Wiggins seldom has recourse to such blatant disruption of the laws governing physical reality; she seldom needs to. As she describes it physical reality, and especially human reality, is lush, awesome and unnerving enough without angelic complication.
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
'The return of nature to Wordsworthian commentary is a corollary of the environmentalist spirit of the age.'
Seamus Perry on Jonathan Bate's 'Radical Wordsworth'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/force-of-nature
My review of Samanta Schewblin's 'Little Eyes', in this month's issue of @Lit_Review
https://literaryreview.co.uk/tamagotcha
'Has the printed book finally outlived its span?' asks @AdamCSDouglas. 'If so, how long can the rare book trade continue? And how much longer can we keep flying in fat-bellied jets to gather in some foreign land to exhibit our wares?'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-long-can-we-keep-doing-this