It's often claimed that the only people who recognise a real difference between science fiction and literary fiction are those who only read the latter. I'm inclined to argue the opposite. I came of age in an era when science fiction was well-regarded, its authors were published by Penguin Modern Classics, and sci-fi was 'acceptable reading' for someone with an interest in books. But it became clear to me as soon as I started reading science fiction that you could not be a fan of the genre... [read more]
Mary Beard’s Women and Power: A Manifesto is an accessible, poignant and convincing call to arms. It investigates historical precedent for silencing and disempowering women, considers women’s own testimonies and looks at where we are today in the fight for gender equality. Building on two lectures for the London Review of Books, one from 2014, the other 2017, Beard deftly moves between ancient tropes and contemporary events to assess ways in which women’s voices have, and continue to be,... [read more]
Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems is one of the best volumes of 21st-century poetry I’ve read. I consider it something of a set of axioms that the best formal poetry is also always free, that the best free verse is also always formal, and that ultimately form and freedom are more synonymous than they are antithetical. In this regard, reading Three Poems was like encountering a demonstration of a proof.
In a similar vein, advancing a tradition often entails taking pains to interrogate and... [read more]
Ece Temelkuran, How to Lose a Country: the 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
reviewed by William Eichler
In 2004, at the height of the War on Terror, President George W. Bush gave a speech at a NATO conference in Istanbul praising the Turkish government. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), he insisted, demonstrated that Islam and liberal democracy were compatible and provided an example for a benighted Muslim world to emulate. ‘Your country, with 150 years of democratic and social reform, stands as a model to others,’ he told the gathered dignitaries.
Today, the ‘Turkish... [read more]
Rodrigo Fuentes, trans. Ellen Jones, Trout, Belly Up
reviewed by Jessie Spivey
The short story suffers the reputation of lightness. Readers often view them as writer’s way of cutting their teeth, or else as an easy introduction to their larger body of work; the less assiduous treat them like a pick n’ mix, praising and cherishing some stories and overlooking others. Trout, Belly Up, by Guatemalan author Rodrigo Fuentes, is a poor candidate for such lackadaisical approaches. Shortlisted for the 2018 Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Short Story prize – the most important... [read more]
Photography is a recurring source of anxiety in Abigail Parry’s debut collection. Throughout, it is configured as a life-taking or violent act (it is, after all, an activity betrayed by the words we use for it: we take or capture pictures; we shoot our subjects), and it occasions an Angela Carter-like bloody chamber, in the form of a darkroom. Entitled ‘Red-rooms’, the grisly contents of the darkroom are the expected ‘exes, dressed in lace’ of the Bluebeard story, but also the moniker... [read more]
The ‘handsomest boys in the Ardoyne’ have Perry Como on their minds, a stiff drink on their lips and nothing in their hearts. In David Keenan’s second novel, we’re in Belfast in the 1970s and dreams of a Free State are spilling through the streets like blood. Just like the actual Troubles, this is a story as much about Adam’s apples as it is about Adam. The visionary occult is laced with men butchered in bed, targets shot in the face, and a mother blown up by a bomb that was planted... [read more]
M. Beatrice Fazi, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics
reviewed by Dominic Fox
‘The trouble with computers,’ as Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor once remarked, ‘is that they're very sophisticated idiots. They do exactly what you tell them at amazing speed’. As M. Beatrice Fazi's Contingent Computation argues, this is only the beginning of our troubles with computers. A computer is, notionally, deterministic in its operation: if you know exactly what state it is in, you can predict exactly what its next state will be. But knowing what its state will be a million... [read more]
Christopher Schaberg, The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth
reviewed by Marc Farrant
Near the beginning of The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth, Christopher Schaberg – a professor teaching in New Orleans and world-renowned expert on the cultures of airports – recalls that, ‘[a]fter the election of Trump, I started having small-scale crises about what to teach, how to teach, and basically what’s its all for’. This sentiment is likely to resonate with Schaberg’s readers, many of whom are deeply invested in the humanities and higher education. Unlike for the... [read more]
Jules B. Farber, James Baldwin: Escape From America, Exile in Provence
reviewed by David C. Jones
In 1970 the African American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul de Vence, a small, medieval town in Provence, southeast France. For much of the previous decade, he had been one of America’s most feted writers. His status in the civil rights movement, meanwhile, as documented in Raoul Peck’s acclaimed 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, briefly rivalled that of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. By the end of the sixties, however, Baldwin found himself... [read more]
