Sincerity gets a bad rap, and perhaps understandably so. It can easily tip into sentimentality, which at best can feel like a kind of deranged optimism; at worst it can carry with it the ickiness of unearned intimacy and emotional exposure. I’m thinking too of the coercive sentimentality in wellbeing practices: consider the range of mindfulness apps cynically employed to pacify the anxious capitalist subject. I will confess to bringing some of these reservations to my initial reading of... [read more]
Dylan Riley, Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present
reviewed by Luke Warde
What are they? The sociologist Dylan Riley poses this question at the very outset of Microverses, referring to the 110 — originally handwritten — ‘notes’ out of which this, his latest book, is made. Their writing was prompted by a confluence of personal, political and social crises: his wife Emmanuela’s illness, the final months of the Trump presidency, and the Covid pandemic. Most are short discursive essays of varying length and on various political, sociological and cultural... [read more]
There is a paradox at play when it comes to memoir. On the one hand is the attempt to be honest about one’s life, and on the other is the mask we all wear — the way we wish to be seen versus the way we want to see ourselves. Does a memoir ever truly go behind the mask, or is it just another performative aspect of it? The very act of writing a memoir — or, at the very least, seeking to publish a memoir — is to present oneself as one wishes to be seen. The paradox lies here: by examining... [read more]
David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch
reviewed by Miles Beard
The first problem one encounters with David Mamet’s new essay collection, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is figuring out what in the hell he’s talking about. What begins to reveal itself, however, is that this question is answered more easily by asking a subtly different one: who in the hell is he talking to?
By his own self-mythologising, Mamet is still a humble newspaperman who, despite the judgement of his critics, somehow foraged a path to becoming... [read more]
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]
