‘What we excrete comes back to consume us,’ Nick Shay remarks pithily in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, one of the pre-eminent texts of waste literature. Nuclear waste is the ‘underhistory’ of the American 20th century. Waste Tide, the recently translated first novel of Chen Qiufan, is the underhistory of ‘The Chinese Century’ and 21st-century capital: the disposal of electronic waste and consumer technologies.
Chen Qiufan belongs to a new generation of Chinese science fiction... [read more]
Elsa Court, The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film and Photography, 1955-1985
reviewed by Neil Archer
While ‘the road’ has long been recognised as an important motif in American culture, from the Beats to the Hollywood road movie, those places along or between the highways – the gas stations, roadside diners and motels – have not always had the critical attention they deserve. This is the argument at the heart of Elsa Court’s engaging and illuminating study. Taking us through case studies of key works across literature and the visual arts – Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Robert... [read more]
Elisa Shua Dusapin, trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, Winter in Sokcho
reviewed by Beatrice Tridimas
The Sokcho in Elisa Shua Dusapin’s award-winning novel is not the bustling, bright tourist town on the border between South and North Korea that some know it as. Its neon lights still flash and the stench of fresh fish still hangs in the air but the beach runs bare. Sokcho is waiting:
‘Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.
That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.’
Winter in Sokcho is a masterfully crafted tale of identity, alienation and longing, set... [read more]
Matt Colquhoun, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher
reviewed by Niall Gallen
Owen Jones recently wrote an article in The Guardian titled ‘The Tories have evolved as the left plays the same old tune.’ The piece aptly describes the political context to which Matt Colquhoun’s Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher responds: a context which has undoubtedly accelerated due to the present global pandemic, but which remains dubious – wait, are the Right really enacting left-of-centre policy now?
Colquhoun’s book also responds to another, no less important... [read more]
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
reviewed by Stuart Walton
If it were possible to pinpoint the originary moment of capitalism, the long-deferred process of dismantling it might begin. Was it inaugurated when the accumulated profits of trade began to be invested in greater technological means of productivity in western Europe's late Middle Ages? Is trade itself, the selling of products at greater return than the cost invested in recovering, obtaining or manufacturing them, inherently capitalist? Is the act of exchange itself, which can be traced back to... [read more]
Michael Glover, Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art
reviewed by Anna Parker
Of all fashion trends, the codpiece is one of the most bizarre. From the 1540s to the end of the century, men in Renaissance Europe put their genitals in a prominent, heavily embellished pouch which stuck out proudly from their breeches. The world ‘cod’ means scrotum, which originated from the Anglo-Saxon for a small bag. Unsurprisingly, writers much enjoyed riffing off the meanings of the ‘cod’, which was repurposed as slang for a clergyman or for a large sum of money. As a visual... [read more]
Alex Niven, New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England
reviewed by Thom Cuell
Addressing his people after the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by nuclear bombs, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito stated that ‘the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest’. Similarly, for those of us invested in the project of redefining modern British culture beyond the sense of ‘narrow Englishness’ that has dominated the early 21st century, the electoral situation has developed not... [read more]
Towards the end of JM Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron (1990), Mrs Curren, an elderly white South African professor, becomes newly aware of the stacks of old photographs filling her home. Studying a family photo taken in the garden, she wonders:
‘Who are the ghosts and who are the presences? Who, outside the picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bursting it in?’
Photographs are used in everyday... [read more]
Sophie Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital
reviewed by Douglas Field
What was – or is – the avant-garde? As Sophie Seita discusses in Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, ‘it is a label that most scholars of avant-garde work either leave unquestioned or theorize to the point of limiting is application.’ And since, as Seita claims, the term is ‘popularly understood to refer to an individual or group with an anti-establishment attitude, producing stylistically innovative work, often with political aims in mind,’... [read more]
Paige Lewis's debut collection Space Struck is a study in introspection: it probes the complexities, anguish and joy of interpersonal relationships. Drawing on a range of influences, Lewis creates an intense and richly realised interiority. Part melodrama, part fairytale, Lewis's jaded confessionals create a kind of poetic noir that is nevertheless decidedly contemporary in register.
The collection begins with 'Normal Everyday Creatures' whose speaker invents a game in which identifying... [read more]
