Ismail Kadare, trans. John Hodgson, A Dictator Calls
reviewed by Bronwyn Scott-McCharen
Ismail Kadare’s latest offering in English is a cross between a game of telephone and a crime scene investigation. The crime: an alleged phone call between the feared Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the famed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, in which Pasternak either bravely stands up for or cowardly denies any connection to his friend and fellow writer, beleaguered poet Osip Mandelstam. In A Dictator Calls, Kadare serves as chief investigator, continually dissecting and revisiting these three... [read more]
Seichō Matsumoto, trans. Jesse Kirkwood, Tokyo Express
reviewed by William Davies
Since the beginning of the Golden Age of crime writing, trains have provided countless opportunities for excitement and tension. Whether it is trains caught at the very last second, events glimpsed through the windows of speeding carriages, or trains shuttling from the city to the countryside, where, if you agree with W. H. Auden, the best murder mysteries take place, trains have long been a source for drama. Trains can also be their own little worlds of hope and peril. When Agatha Christie put... [read more]
Caroline Magennis, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures
reviewed by Archie Cornish
In Anna Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001), the protagonist Amelia watches as her big sister and a gang of friends deliberately poison themselves. The grown-ups have left the building but there’s not much to do in 1980s Ardoyne. So Lizzie and ‘the Girls’ divide out a ‘twelve-year old nutmeg’ and wash it down with ‘an ancient packet of mustard and a rusty tin of peas’. Amelia watches them laugh in delight as the bad peas explode, ‘one by one inside them’. The violent... [read more]
In 2013, a National Geographic photographer named Steve Winter captured a now-famous image of a Los Angeles icon: lit by the twinkle of the city below, the mountain lion dubbed P-22 slinks past the Hollywood sign, his muscles surging and amber eyes trained on the path ahead. P-22, also known as the Hollywood Cat, is said to have lived in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for some ten years before being euthanised by scientists in late 2022. When he was officially laid to rest earlier this year in... [read more]
Miquel de Palol, trans. Adrian Nathan West, The Garden of Seven Twilights
reviewed by Josh Billings
To someone raised on a diet of 19th and 20th-century fiction, Miquel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights reads like a very strange novel. In many ways, it does not read like a novel at all. A huge part of this has to do with its structure. Whereas most contemporary novels move like trains, travelling from a predictable point A to a prearranged, if hopefully satisfying point B, de Palol’s book seems to expand in all directions at once, like a fleet of getaway cars. The experience of... [read more]
Herschel Caine, the 38-year-old protagonist of Andrew Lipstein’s new novel, The Vegan, is in trouble. He may have, indirectly, killed someone. Or almost killed someone. At the beginning of the book, during a small dinner party in his impressive Brooklyn brownstone, Herschel secretly slips a sleeping aid into the drink of his wife’s old college roommate, a loudmouth lush hogging the conversation, in the hopes this would ‘accelerate her jet lag’. But when this suddenly somnolent guest... [read more]
Joe Molloy, Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music
reviewed by Alexis Forss
‘Detroit was always a great music town, and always will be,’ writes Joe Molloy early in Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music. A deeply felt strain of hometown glory courses through this ambitious and amiable book which, in its 170 pages, zooms through six decades of musical history, builds upon the legacy of the late Mark Fisher, and envisions the renewal of the city’s best countercultural currents. ‘What emerges is an unapologetically modernist trajectory where the... [read more]
It’s hard to ‘do’ Surrealism well in the now, despite its illustrious history. In a way, many of its historical innovations have become part of the wider poetry language. Just as Imagism helped to move poetry into the modern era, thus obviating the need for its own continuation as a ‘movement’, so too did Surrealism help to open the poetic landscape (or mindscape) to new and ‘marvelous’ possibilities, in the process becoming surrealism with a small-s. Yet, Surrealism as a... [read more]
I first encountered Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction last summer. Originally published in 1986, it was reissued by Ignota Press in 2019. I was dubious of its small size, but the bright purple cover appealed to me. As did the title, which elicits both a nugget-sized life lesson, and that the book should in fact be small, since it must be carried. In this essay, Le Guin writes about the human invention of the carrier vessel — which can be anything from a leaf to a net of... [read more]
Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Towards the end of Lorrie Moore's fourth novel, its doubly bereaved central character asks, in defiant inverse of the classical philosophical query first posed by Leibniz, 'why is there now nothing rather than something?' In a world where popular sentiment hears only a wrong note in the word 'died' , what happens to those who pass, pass on, pass away, leave us, vanish? Newly bereft of both his nearest and his dearest, Finn finds himself reflecting on what it all adds up to. 'Suffering then... [read more]
