Virginia Woolf, Merve Emre (ed.), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
reviewed by Ellie Mitchell
You see, I’m thinking furiously about Reading & Writing. I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment — Dinner!
—The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 30 August 1923
Virginia Woolf’s famous caving method, or what she later termed her... [read more]
Harry Freedman, Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Speaking at the outset of his recording career in 1967, Leonard Cohen told an interviewer from a Canadian student newspaper, that he regarded himself in the manner of a cantor, the hieratic official in synagogue and church who leads the faithful in singing and prayer. Etymologically, a cantor is not just a singer but a teacher, but Cohen saw himself not as participating in the established observances of one congregation or the other, but as 'the priest of a catacomb religion that is... [read more]
‘Some said they moved,’ writes Dinah Berland in her poem ‘Sephirot’, ‘because Lake Michigan resembled the Black Sea.’ Reading the poems in Hotel at the End of the World feels like stepping into the clarity of a swimming pool. Various poetic forms such as the sestina, sonnet and the Arabic ghazal drift with lyrical beauty as they archive moments in Berland’s life and by extension, those of her ancestors. Bridging the living world with the dead, her poems write into existence family... [read more]
Albert Camus’ The Plague was initially interpreted as an allegory for the cataclysm that had just preceded its publication: the Nazi occupation of France, resistance to which the author had famously contributed. This reading, which Camus was loath to deny, struck many as dubious: Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir, among others, highlighted the danger of suggesting that Nazism was akin to a ‘natural’ phenomenon such as an epidemic, rather than a product of human relations, however... [read more]
Andrew Hussey, Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou
reviewed by Douglas Field
In 1945, the Romanian poet Isidore Isou wrote an open letter to Parisian publishers. Although he had recently arrived in the French capital, the 22-year-old writer was incensed that major publishing houses had yet to take note of his brilliance: ‘I’m warning you now that my friends and I will come and smash your faces in if you don’t publish my work which will great create upheavals.’ Isou’s threats to the ‘old bastards’ of the post-war Parisian literary establishment were not... [read more]
Hannah Dawson (ed.), The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
It seems the perfect time to be a feminist. We’re everywhere — in the boardroom with Sheryl Sandberg, leaning in to our corporate power; shaking our tail feather on stage with Beyonce; speaking with Emma Watson at the UN, immaculately coiffed and styled. Feminism is no longer the dreaded ‘f-word’; no longer the butt of bad jokes about unshaved armpits and never getting a man — it is positively to be celebrated. Enter any high street store that aims itself even vaguely at the... [read more]
Rachel Greenwald Smith, On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal
reviewed by Ruby Hamilton
Compromise is an often-understated term in the late Lauren Berlant’s writing about ‘cruel optimism’, defined in their words as ‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’. Indeed, compromise is cruel optimism rendered as an agreement: it means accepting, even desiring, something that is, by definition, a diminished version of what you want. So why are we drawn... [read more]
Speculative fiction is a literature of ideas. Fahrenheit 451 pondered a tyranny of censorship, Neuromancer considered the lines between consciousness and computer, and The Handmaid’s Tale simulated an extraction of human rights. Speculative fiction is timely; a window with slight reflection. The genre blends what is and what could be by asking, what if? Venetia Welby’s second novel, Dreamtime, is a Zoom call to the not-so-distant future. One where the lack of human reconciliation for the... [read more]
Fiction that successfully moves between trenchant political concerns and unabated dreamlike logic and imagery is a rare thing to come across. Flann O’Brien’s works, at once madcap and tragic, come to mind; so too does Norman Lock’s fiction, which has a penchant for blending historical resonance with dream logic. And the short fiction that first put George Saunders on the map also unites politically conscious themes with frenetic imagery. Isabel Waider’s work likewise exists in a... [read more]
Selma James, Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet
reviewed by Frith Taylor
Selma James is a writer and activist who has written extensively on the interrelated issues that affect women's liberation. Her book Sex, Race and Class (1974) is regarded by many as a classic of early Marxist feminism. This new anthology of her writing begins in 1977 with the Wages for Housework campaign for which she is best known, and concludes in 2020 with James advocating a care income in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way she looks at a number of revolutionary... [read more]
