Samantha Ellis
Prospero Imprisoned
When the Hogarth Shakespeare series was first announced, the idea of commissioning writers to ‘reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for the 21st century’ was met by some with mistrust. To those working in theatre, however, it didn’t feel like an affront: reimagining Shakespeare is what directors, designers and actors do each time they embark on a new production. So it’s both appropriate and rather thrilling that Margaret Atwood retells The Tempest from the perspective of a director with big ideas about Shakespeare’s tricksy late romance.
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'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings