The story of the showman who comes to town is as old as escapism, and just as double-edged. When the circus rolls in, a world of pure distraction materialises before the downtrodden masses, rapidly constructed in the open spaces and filling their habitual vacancy with reckless acts of daring and astonishing curiosities, like Sleary’s horse troupe energising the lousy stinking lives of Coketown’s labourers in Hard Times. The travelling show was never just about entertainment, though; it... [read more]
Agnès Gayraud, trans. Robin Mackay, D.C. Miller & Nina Power , Dialectic of Pop
reviewed by Dan Barrow
The first book from musician and philosopher Agnès Gayraud starts from what seems like a Quixotic and unproductive project: to develop a theory of pop music as an ‘aesthetic form’ beginning from the work of the philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno. His writings on the ‘light music’ of the 1930s are notorious for their unceasing assault on what even sceptical critics took to be harmless or edifying styles like hot jazz and swing. He’s thus become the great bogeyman of academic... [read more]
Do you remember what you did yesterday? At first there’s a blank, a slight panic. Then you let your mind relax. All is fog, but little by little, things start to come back. Not in order. A call with S in the afternoon, a flurry of WhatsApps with R. A quick lunch of rice and broad bean salad with fresh parsley and garlic. Some scattered reading in the morning — a few pages of a book, an article posted by an acquaintance — then in the evening, wine and a Simone Signoret flick, Ship... [read more]
Growing up, Bridget Grant, the narrator of My Phantoms, couldn’t wait to leave her clan — her indifferent older sister; cruel, conceited father; and eager but essentially performative mother—so she left Liverpool as soon as she finished school. Now a fortysomething academic living in London with her partner John, she hasn’t spoken to her father in years. She even skipped his funeral. She keeps visits to her mother pegged at once per year, on her mother’s birthday, while her sister... [read more]
There is a moment in Nicholas Royle’s story ‘L0nd0n’ where the narrator, an editor at a small publishing house, does his job rather sloppily, allowing three different spellings for one term: ‘ghost writer, ghost-writer and, finally, the correct term, ghostwriter.’ Funnily enough, the narrator never actually meets the author of this brilliant new novel, one nondescript Ian, in person. Does he exist at all? He appears, rather, the literal embodiment of that misspelt term, its repetition... [read more]
Hatty Nestor, Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice
reviewed by Brett Walsh
In her first book, Ethical Portraits, Hatty Nestor examines artworks, activist projects and individuals subverting forensics, to find a morally acceptable way of representing people in the US prison system, exposing how they are dehumanised by their exclusion from representation and self-expression. She pays careful attention to the mediums of portraiture because she is acutely aware that each attempt at representation is intimately linked to a real feeling person, who deserves respect.... [read more]
Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser (eds.), A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill
reviewed by Ben Leubner
‘Poetry,’ said Frost, ‘provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.’ No wonder, then, that a young James Merrill took to it so avidly, seeking whatever permissible ways he could find to say things that could not otherwise be said in the mid-20th century, especially if it was guaranteed to upset one’s mother.
When Merrill’s mother found out that her son, then a student at Amherst College, was having a romantic affair with one of his instructors, Kimon... [read more]
Even if it does feel like a kind of middle-class aliens-built-the-pyramids project, I find it hard not to be fascinated by the Shakespeare authorship question. What I mean is, if I were to be offered one use of a prototype time machine — to go anywhere at anytime — I’d already be wearing my neck ruff and make-up. But when it comes to the work of Shakespeare, the need for certainty is a contradiction. Imagine, for a moment, that we knew everything there was to know about William... [read more]
Naomi Ishiguro’s assured, sensitive debut novel, Common Ground follows the intertwined lives of Stan and Charlie, who meet as teenagers on the common in Newford and reunite by chance as adults in London. Thirteen-year-old Stan is bookish, small for his age, and being bullied by bigger, posher boys at school. His father has recently died and he doesn’t feel he can talk to his busy, emotionally-distant mother about his troubles. In other words, he is desperately in need of a friend. The... [read more]
The stories in Ben Pester’s debut collection are surreal and disturbing, and yet also somehow an uncanny depiction of how we live now. In the same way we don’t notice when we are dreaming, his stories teeter on a margin between the conceivable and the extremely crackers — the ‘just the sort of shit that would happen’ margin. In fact, you might say his stories are less surreal or unfeasible so much as merely unlikely — although who could recognise what’s likely these days as we... [read more]
