A black-and-white photograph — landscape, extending over two pages. A woman takes up the right-hand page, her face and torso specifically. At first instance she reminds you of a young Cher, the same long features and dark eyes. The woman is also holding a landscape photograph. It shows a catastrophic incident: what was once a building now debris and ash and mephitic smoke, men in thick gloves standing by. The smoke hints at the sequential relationship between the disaster and the photograph.... [read more]
In his introduction to Reverse Engineering — the inaugural publication by Scratch Books — the collection’s editor and interviewer, Tom Conaghan, invokes cartographers and mapping. He marvels that ‘one amazing story is only a minute piece of the map,’ and writes of the ‘landmass’ and ‘[n]avigating’ of stories. The book’s project is a good one: to disassemble seven short stories, and map out how they work. ‘Understanding writers’ craft,’ Conaghan sets out, ‘is less... [read more]
Tim Key, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush: An Anthology of Poems and Conversations from Outside
reviewed by Archie Cornish
Tim Key’s He Used Thought As A Wife (2020) emerged from the first lockdown, the heartbreakingly sunny twelve weeks bookended by the closing of the pubs and their heavily asterisked opening up. Its backbone is a series of dialogues, slant renderings of virtual conversations with friends and family. As we learned, though, Zoom could only ward off so much ennui. In place of dialogue at the end of Week Six comes a solitary dream vision. Key stares out of the window at a ‘parade’ in the street... [read more]
Mona, by Argentinian author Pola Oloixarac, has been out in English long enough —15 months in the US and four in the UK — and so widely reviewed that its plot has already been regurgitated dozens of times in as many publications, so we’ll keep that bit short here. What plot there is can be summed up simply enough in any case: Mona, a troubled writer who attends a Swedish literary prize-giving festival, thinks snarky thoughts about the writers there, ditches most of the talks, masturbates... [read more]
About a third of the way through Sarah Holland-Batt’s third book of poems, The Jaguar, the penny drops that the titular animal is not a charismatic spotted American big cat but instead is a car, a ‘vintage 1980 XJ’. The Jag, ‘a folly he bought without test-driving’, belonged to her father, whose decline and death from Parkinson’s are a central subject of the book. He ultimately ruined it through incessant tinkering ‘and it sat like a carcass / in the garage, like a headstone, like... [read more]
Nina Hanz’s Placeholders is a lucid contemplation of landscape, power and the act of naming. A sincere evocation of the natural world, Placeholders is nevertheless aware of the tensions present in eulogising landscape; Hanz’s work explores gender, property, migration and settler colonialism.
Attentive to the mythologisation of women in nature, these poems are somewhere between eco-feminism, folk horror and prayer. Hanz pays homage to a litany of female luminaries; there are astronauts... [read more]
Ivan Jablonka, A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
A recent Guardian article asked male authors to name one book they would recommend by a woman. It set my little (feminist, literary) corner of the internet aflame, falling over itself to mock a selection of famous male writers who did not appear to have read anything by women for several decades. The article is tone-deaf in its ignorance – Richard Curtis admits, with no evident shame, to not having really read anything by a woman until the Covid lockdowns; To Kill a Mockingbird and... [read more]
Patrick Galbraith, In Search Of One Last Song: Britain’s Disappearing Birds And The People Trying To Save Them
reviewed by Richard Smyth
This isn’t a bad time to be a suburban nature writer. For one thing, it isn’t a bad time for suburban nature: there are peregrines and rose-ringed parakeets and foxes and things, and if all else fails we can always get a beehive or write about the time our adorable child met a woodlouse on the front step. There are relatively few barriers to our voices being heard, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, seeing as many more people live in suburbs, or indeed actual urbs, than live up hills... [read more]
László Krasznahorkai, trans. John Batki, Chasing Homer
reviewed by Gertrude Gibbons
‘Killers are on my trail, and not swans, of course not swans, I've no idea why I said swans.’ In the abstract to László Krasznahorkai's Chasing Homer, the speaker's voice is immediately put to question. They do not have control of what they are saying; they do not know why they are saying it. Their words run away with themselves, thoughts falling ahead or behind, as though mouth and mind are out of sync. In the background of these opening words are the falling beats of Szilveszter... [read more]
Set in the year between 9/11 and the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, Michael LaPointe’s The Creep represents a quiet tiptoe back towards the most inescapable event of 21st-century history after several prominent rapid response novels about Donald Trump. There’s the slightest of narrative frames: retired cultural journalist Whitney Chase is visited in her office for a consultancy firm by a Vice writer covering the retrospective republication of The Bystander, a short-lived periodical that... [read more]
