James Purdon
Pen Pals
Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011
By Paul Auster & J M Coetzee
Faber & Faber/Harvill Secker 248pp £20 order from our bookshop
There’s always something slightly uncomfortable about reading other people’s mail, though we’re happy to relax the taboo if the correspondents are famous enough, even more if they’re safely posthumous. It isn’t often that we’re invited to read letters between living writers, which makes Here and Now something of a novelty: a near-current record of correspondence between two major contemporary authors over a three-year period.
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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
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https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness