Suzi Feay
Papering over the Cracks
Blended families are complicated enough in real life; in fiction they pose significant challenges. When a minor character announces, ‘My daughter’s ex-husband was a fraudster and a thief’, even the most alert reader might have to stop and check that they know who’s who. Michael Arditti’s new novel is not literally full of widows and orphans, but it is pervaded by a sense of adriftness and fracture.
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Enjoying Susan Owens’s essay on English attitudes to nature in @Lit_Review. Turns out the early moderns were positively repulsed by hills, as described in this poem by Isaak Walton’s fishing chum Charles Cotton.
In this month's Silenced Voices, @lucyjpop shines a light on the tragic case of Shady Habash, a filmmaker who died in an Egyptian prison in May.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/shady-habash
One study found that hoarders 'had lesions on the mesial prefrontal cortex of their brains ... Collecting and hoarding, in other words, are the results of brain damage.'
James Delbourgo explores the psychology of minimalists & collectors.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness