Tim Martin
Laughter in the Dark
Lorrie Moore’s energetically forlorn, desperately hilarious short stories seem to take a while to compose. Bark is her first new collection in 15 years. But the pieces in this volume show that she has lost none of her capacity to disturb while she amuses. These eight stories are crawling with jokes, quirks, asides and comic observations to the point that it’s almost possible to overlook how sad they are, and how obsessed with death, decline, sickness, fading and a roster of personal and political betrayals. ‘If you’re suicidal and you don’t actually kill yourself,’ says one character, articulating what seems like a theme of the collection, ‘you become known as “wry”.’
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
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate