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]
One of my friends likes to pose the same question. In which artistic medium, he asks, are we seeing the most radical experimentation of form right now? His own answer is always the same: video games. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But it’s easier to push the boundaries in such a young field.’ Depending on how you periodise the history of the modern novel — most academics agree that it begins with Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the early 17th century, others trace the form to the third or fourth... [read more]
If you were to outline a Waidnerian aesthetic, on the strength of their last four books, it might go like this: a fearless cannibalism of existing texts, TV shows, animated films, novels, you name it; what Waidner themself identified in 2019 as a ‘disidentificatory’ practice vis à vis the existing canon of avant-garde literature; a thoroughgoing engagement with the actual class and racial politics of this grim little island, rather than the ones we tell ourselves we have; slightly... [read more]
