For much of his career, Levé was known primarily as a photographer, and his form of choice was the photo-series. He made obsessive use of what Zadie Smith calls, in an essay on Levé published in Harper’s, the ‘deferred term’: the absence that structures the aesthetic field, nowhere visible in the frame but for this very reason determining our experience of every object within it. In the series Rugby, for example, Levé depicts men’s bodies tangled up together in piles; thanks to the title, we can recognise this scene as a scrum, and the men as players grouped around an invisible ball. [read full essay]
Written as the exhibition text for Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time, exhibited at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book is less a companion than an accessory to the film, a kind of textual bauble that draws attention to itself rather than clarifying anything about the work it ostensibly accompanies. This disjunction can’t be accidental — Kan-Sperling refers to Little Pink Book in an afternote as a ‘perverse mistranslation’ of In Her Time, a phrase that gestures toward irreverence. And it saturates the text: ornamentation isn’t a flourish but the only mode of engagement. [read full essay]
Loren Ipsum is a number of extraordinary things: the daughter of a high-flying architect and a renowned landscape gardener, an alumna of the University of Oxford, a former model, a beloved children’s author, and even a bestselling novelist. Now she is a literary journalist to boot – a writer, that is, who writes about writers and writing (and whose work seems to feature exclusively in publications with names ending in ‘Review of Books’). She is, then, almost a fantasy or parody version... [read more]
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night
reviewed by Jemima Skala
There is a necessary asynchrony to reading Olga Tokarczuk in English translation, an author with so many Polish-language novels in her back pocket, many of which have taken years to come to anglophone shelves. Readers who access her in her original language will have built a more chronological picture of her oeuvre over time; they will, perhaps, possess a knowledge of patterns, tropes, and recurring imagery as it has built on the strength of one novel to the next — her fascination with... [read more]
One of several good jokes in Gabriel Flynn’s debut novel, Poor Ghost!, comes when the narrator, Luca, a youngish man adrift back home in Manchester after flunking out of his Harvard PhD in English Literature, encounters a Manchester-specific table display in Waterstones. His eye is drawn to ‘a new novel by a Mancunian writer named Jonny Fletcher’:
Cotton City. It seemed to be about a DJ who gets drawn into Manchester’s criminal underworld when he begins to research his grandfather, a... [read more]
Hélène Bessette, trans. Kate Briggs, Lili is Crying
reviewed by Rachel Dastgir
After her husband is arrested by the French Gestapo, the title character of Lili Is Crying walks into her local bar. The regulars watch her with measured curiosity. ‘Doesn’t misfortune make a person cry?’ they wonder; Lili is dry-eyed. She orders a glass of white wine before turning to the room and announcing, ‘Things never happen to me the way they do to other people. My life, it’s a whole novel’. She’s right – in a way.
First published in 1953 and now translated into... [read more]
I first encountered Brigid Brophy through Aubrey Beardsley. Brophy had written a book, Black and White, about the artist; I was trawling through criticism of his work for an undergrad project. It’s difficult, sometimes, to dislodge one’s opinions of an artist from the associative conditions you have met them under. With Brophy and Beardsley, fortunately, this was something that worked, as placing them in conversation boded well: two queer, idiosyncratic aesthetes who placed eroticism at the... [read more]
Who has more ease? The robot or the human? In her debut novel To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, Harriet Armstrong returns to this question again and again. The book — the longest release yet from Les Fugitives’ ‘quick brown fox’ collection, a line of English-language originals from a press known for French translations — brilliantly focuses on what it means to simulate emotions vs. to feel emotions. To live with the messy and the nuanced or to find solace in the scripted and rule-based.... [read more]
I confess my interests here are not dispassionate. The covid pandemic stands out to me, but not because of the virus. Instead, I inspected the whites of my eyes, believing them to have turned blue. Visits to the Mayo Clinic, Web MD and NHS websites confirmed my fears: ‘Blue sclera’ is a symptom of a degenerative neurological condition. Within hours, my vision blurred and an ocular migraine came on. Images of the future moved over me, as if I hadn’t been the one to direct them. Blindness,... [read more]
‘Women’s historical fiction’ is, in one sense, like pornography — you know it when you see it. The glossy covers featuring stylish stand-ins for the spunky heroines, often coupled with an airbrushed skyline of the city in which the story takes place, are prominent features on bookstore shelves and bestseller lists, the stories within these covers beloved by book clubs big and small. Agents and editors are hungry — starving — for it, especially if it sports some ‘literary’ flair... [read more]
Toby Manning, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Can music change the world? Is it possible to recover elements of a liberated consciousness, one that might lead to emancipatory social praxis, from a cultural repository as deeply enmeshed in capitalism as the pop industry? These are questions that haunted much of leftist aesthetics in the postwar era. Refusing the mainstream procedures of classical harmony, as the Second Vienna School did, had done nothing to inspire a revolutionary awakening in the era of the Great War, but where music was... [read more]
I’m a dentist. I prefer to be a historian.
Historian, that’s me, by necessity pressed to dentistry.
— A tooth teller!
— The whole tooth!
— Nothing but!
Kevin Davey is a novelist of extraordinary range, ambition, and uncommon literary courage. His work defies genre constraints, narrative expectations, and even reader comfort but, rather than alienating, this boldness makes his work feel vital, and a reminder that fiction can provoke, disturb, and illuminate. His novels don’t... [read more]
