There’s a moment near the beginning of Federico Falco’s The Plains where the narrator, tired after a day of digging and planting his garden, has a rest. It’s January, near Zapiola in Buenos Aires province, on the pampas — the vast, flat grassland that spreads in a shallow half-moon from the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay into the South American continent. The narrator relishes the inactivity: ‘the pleasure of not doing anything, semidarkness at siesta hour, reclining to read on the floor, bare back against cold tiles’. [read full essay]
Few books have transformed a poet’s reputation as dramatically as Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror transformed John Ashbery’s. Published in 1975, Ashbery’s seventh full-length collection brought him the widespread critical approval which the previous six had not, sweeping the major poetry prizes and selling a remarkable number of copies for a poetry book written by someone not called Ocean Vuong or Rupi Kaur. [read full essay]
Joe Luc Barnes, Farewell to Russia: A Journey Through the Former USSR
reviewed by WJ Davies
The first line of the Soviet Union’s national anthem proclaimed ‘an unbreakable union of free republics’. Time proved ‘unbreakable’ wrong, and ‘free’ was always pretty dubious. The fortunes of those ‘free republics’ after the USSR’s collapse were as varied as its population, yet they have seldom troubled Western news cycles unless Russia has threatened their sovereignty. Between 2022 and 2024, journalist Joe Luc Barnes visited each of the 15 nations that formerly comprised... [read more]
Just as my Spanish is broken, barely functional, and rather embarrassing in practice, yet somehow better than nothing, my background knowledge applicable to Ito Romo’s new novel, Filth Eaters, would be found wanting. This slender work, published by Deep Vellum, hinges on the intersection of the language of civilisations and body horror, specifically Spanish and vampirism. I’ve stood in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City and gawked at the Aztec artefacts, but I’ve never... [read more]
Madeline Cash’s debut novel Lost Lambs has a distinctly American feeling for the pastoral: no one is ever far from a pesticide, an institution or a source of non-perishable food. Half intergenerational bildungsroman and half technocratic noir, the novel consists of a series of neatly plotted dualisms: corporation versus flock, coming-of-age versus eternal youth, vampirism versus bucolicism, layman versus clergy.
Its world is unwholesome and Roman Catholic, like a Henry Darger landscape.... [read more]
Henri Coulette, ed. Michael Caines and Boris Dralyuk, New and Selected Poems
reviewed by Austin Spendlowe
Henri ‘Hank’ Coulette is not known by many. The blame for that lies mostly with his publisher, who had his second book, The Family Goldschmitt (1971), mistakenly pulped. That mishap lead Coulette’s friend Donald Justice to muse in his essay ‘Oblivion’ that ‘[t]here is a randomness in the operation of the laws of fame that approaches the chaotic.’ But Coulette had long been overlooked before that fatal error. His ‘impeccably polished, wittily elegiac, ironically self-effacing... [read more]
Martin Doyle, A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026
reviewed by Tadhg Hoey
‘The shortest way to Tara,’ James Joyce famously wrote over a century ago in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, ‘is via Holyhead.’ Tara, of course, refers to the Hill of Tara, once the seat of Celtic Ireland’s High Kings, and Holyhead is the Welsh town that, for centuries, would have been the first port of call for those leaving Ireland. As a standalone sentence, the cryptic, vaguely contradictory directions are meaningless, but as a metaphor about needing to leave Ireland in... [read more]
Mercedes Halfon, trans. Rahul Bery, Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina
reviewed by Simon Firth
‘Kill Borges!’ Witold Gombrowicz allegedly shouts from aboard the ship carrying him out of Buenos Aires in 1963, 24 years after he’d first arrived as a passenger on a Polish cruise liner. When war broke out in 1939 and the ship was recalled, he decided, on impulse, to stay. He was thirty-five, with two suitcases, two hundred dollars, and two published books behind him – including Ferdydurke, the comic, surrealist novel about a writer abducted by his old schoolteacher, which had... [read more]
Certain scenes and visions recur through Joe Carrick-Varty's poetry. There are picnics and swims, near-photographic depictions of fields and skies. These could be the elemental building materials of a conventional poetics, summer days and the natural world. Those days and that world are here, but they are catastrophically overshadowed by the internalised experiences of domestic violence, his father's alcoholism, and the haunting tragedy of the untimely death of a friend. Carrick-Varty's writing... [read more]
Antoine Volodine, trans. Alyson Waters, The Monroe Girls
reviewed by Katherine Williams
Antoine Volodine’s The Monroe Girls begins on two streets. One is avenue Chouïgo, easily located on a map, and which one can see from the windows of a psychiatric institution where the initial portion of the novel unravels. The other is rue Dellwo, Chouïgo’s negative of sorts — invisible on all standard maps, manifest only with the assistance of rarefied telepathic vision and, if necessary, an outfit of advanced optical equipment.
Volodine’s schizophrenic narrator, who oscillates... [read more]
In 2016, Amitav Ghosh posed the question ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’. A decade on, Richard Powers’ longlisted Booker Prize Bewilderment (2021) and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (2023), as well as university syllabi dedicated solely to climate-change fiction and the recent inauguration of the Climate Fiction Prize, show that ‘cli-fi’, if nothing else, is flourishing. Tara Menon’s debut... [read more]
A new Gwendoline Riley novel might strike a sort of fantastic fear into the heart — may we never be so precisely perceived! Her observation of the minutiae of (awkward, solipsistic, desperate) human behaviour makes her characters painfully real, all their idiosyncrasy and damage laid bare. Characters perform banalities and clichés, struggle to hide their weaknesses whilst hopelessly revealing them, repeat their peculiar gestures and habits.
The foil to the more flamboyant of these... [read more]
