Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds has received a great deal of praise and attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Described by Andrew Macmillan as no less than ‘one of the most important début collections for a generation’ and hailed by the New York Times for its ‘tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’, the collection has sold strongly, a rare feat for poetry, unless the author attended a famous stage school or featured on a Beyonce album. What is it that has made... [read more]
I’ve long got stuck on John Keats’s line, in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, about wanting to be ‘a sort of ethereal Pigs, [. . .] turned loose to feed upon spiritual Mast and Acorns’ as he read Reynolds’s poems. It’s one of those moments when an attempt to describe how Romantic poetry should work ends up overreaching itself. I can appreciate the thrust of Keats’s point, inherited from the German philosophy of his time, that beauty is most fully registered when our sensuous... [read more]
Home Fire has already found itself on the Man Booker longlist, an accolade that highlights the immediacy and poignancy of its representation of radicalisation, the Islamic State, and the place of Islam in the British political and media landscape. Until now, Kamila Shamsie’s fiction has largely maintained an historical focus, narrating Pakistan’s history through the experiences of women, children and families impacted by momentous events of South Asian sovereignty such as colonial rule, the... [read more]
Literary criticism really does call for a sub-genre in the history of the novel: the genre of the modern rant. As with much else in modern literature, the dawn of this mode of literary expression of angst already glimmers in Hamlet’s monologues, but the one text that inaugurates the specifically modern rant is Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. If you have read it, you will probably recall its splenetic opening: ‘I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I... [read more]
Arthur Rose, Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee
reviewed by Rafe McGregor
Arthur Rose is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and one of the two general directors of the Journal of Badiou Studies (with Michael J. Kelly of Binghamton University), which is a rebranding of the International Journal of Badiou Studies. The latter made academic news last year when it was revealed as the victim of the Tripodi Hoax. As explained on the 3 Quarks Daily blog in April 2016, Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse (both of the... [read more]
Heather McDaid & Laura Jones (eds.), Nasty Women: A Collection of Essays + Accounts on What It Is to Be a Woman in the 21st Century
reviewed by Thom Cuell
Conceived in the wake of Donald Trump’s infamous comments about Hillary Clinton, and subsequent election victory, the essay collection Nasty Women was launched via Kickstarter on New Year’s Day 2017, with a target of £6,000. This goal was reached within three days, and after receiving support from the likes of Margaret Atwood on Twitter, the publisher 404 Ink went on to raise a total of £22,156 from over 1,300 supporters. The turnaround time was amazing: the anthology was commissioned in... [read more]
‘There is no home here,’ reads the epigraph by Christopher Isherwood that sets the scene and tone for The Burning Ground, the prose debut of poet Adam O’Riordan. It’s an appropriate prelude to this impressive range of short stories. O’Riordan’s poetic vision explores the male experience by juxtaposing a dreamy Californian landscape and a dreamlike romanticism with rather purgatorial characters and a blurred sense of narrative endings.
This isn’t a typical debut. There is no... [read more]
Vickie Cooper and David Whyte (eds.), The Violence of Austerity
reviewed by Abigail Rhodes
At the turn of the century an obscure home office poster was discovered in Barter Books, a shop in Alnwick, Northumberland, with the motivational slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. It had been prepared in 1939 for use in case of a coastal invasion of the UK by the Nazis and was designed to steady the national nerves in the face of such a calamitous event. The poster was never used in these circumstances but became a fashionable, ironic, comedy catchphrase after its unearthing in 2000. The... [read more]
The essay began – notoriously – as a denizen of the scrap-bin of literature. Montaigne called his efforts, which established the form in European writing, a collection merely of 'tentative attempts' at philosophy, focused on his self, 'a topic so frivolous and so vain' as to waste the reader's time. Addison and Steele's pieces for the Tatler and Spectator were commercial products, dashed off to fill column inches. Samuel Johnson's alternately wandering and stentorian essays for The Idler... [read more]
Laurent Binet, trans. Sam Taylor, The 7th Function of Language
reviewed by Marc Farrant
Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language has all the hallmarks of a romp. It features murder, international intrigue, factional strife, exploding train stations, not to mention a compelling historical conceit. The year is 1980, French philosopher Roland Barthes is strolling through Paris after a luncheon with the French presidential candidate Francois Mitterand when he is mowed down in the Rue des Ecoles by a laundry van. An accident? Is it possible that sheer chance would bring to an end... [read more]
