Sam Leith
Waking Up Is Hard To Do
IT HAS BEEN quite a long while since readers, as opposed to cinemagoers, heard from Alex Garland. His last full-length book, The Tesseract, was five years ago. Has he been in a coma all this time? Well, yes, in a way, he has.The plots and atmospheres of both Garland's previous books were steeped in the experience of hallucination (its menace and disorientation) - in the sensation of the waking dream. A sinister imaginary friend, Mister Duck, accompanies the hero of The Beach
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553