Joanna Kavenna
Making It Whole
The Faraway Nearby
By Rebecca Solnit
Granta Books 259pp £16.99
Some of the most interesting contemporary authors are travelling existentialists – wanderers in thought who also physically wander, from Iain Sinclair to W G Sebald to Rebecca Solnit. In these days of publishing collapse and risk aversion, the journey or quest seems to soothe editorial anxieties about reason, plot and conveyable purpose, allowing the author to muse at will, to experiment with form and tempo, to elide fact and fiction. As Sinclair has an editor say at the beginning of Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, ‘Lit-fic’s a dead duck … Carry on with the same book but pepper it with real names, actual locations … We’ll squeeze you into the travel sections.’
In Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000), Solnit explains: ‘Though the history of walking is, as part of all these fields and everyone’s experience, virtually infinite, this history of walking I am writing can only be partial, an idiosyncratic path traced through them by one walker, with much doubling back
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
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk