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]
Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Modern Work Makes People Miserable
reviewed by Sam Gregory
The 'always on' office culture enabled by smartphones and laptops is coming under increasing scrutiny. A steady stream of books and papers have nudged anti-work ideas into the mainstream in recent years, notably David Graeber’s irreverent 2013 essay ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, David Frayne’s 2015 book The Refusal of Work and most successfully, Rutger Bregman’s 2016 bestseller Utopia for Realists. Joining them is Lab Rats by US tech writer Dan Lyons, who wrote about his time... [read more]
TJ Clark, Heaven On Earth: Painting and the Life to Come
reviewed by Dan Barrow
In Giotto's Joachim's Dream (1304-6), one of a sequence of fresco panels in Padua's Capella Scrovegni, a mountain's profile marks the boundary between earth and sky, at once contiguous and rigidly opposed. The angel descending from top-left marks the sky out as the realm of the divine, its blue ‘as cold as a colour can be, pressing down into the desert at the angel's behest’, and seeming almost to pop out of the picture plane. In the first and most persuasive of the five essays that make up... [read more]
In ‘Betraying Appearances’ (1997), WA Cohen’s excellent review of Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (1997), Cohen leans on O’Farrell’s attentiveness to the relationships between the somatic and the semantic to belabour a point. He talks about words in English whose meanings contradict, suggesting the most ‘beguiling’ of these is the verb belie: ‘To belie is to expose a falsehood; it is also, however, to disguise... [read more]
Nobody could accuse Franco Berardi of underestimating the scale of the problem facing an oppositional politics today. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-17th century, there was a civil polity to which all might be assumed to have sworn allegiance, conceding its right to intervene in the lives of its clients in return for protecting them from a delimited range of private enormities, while expecting them to pre-authorise its own enormous intrusions into intellectual and social liberty, as the guaranteed... [read more]
Édouard Louis, trans. Lorin Stein, Who Killed My Father
reviewed by Adam Scovell
Édouard Louis’s third book, Who Killed My Father (Qui a tué mon père), begins by setting out the blueprint for another form. ‘If this were a text for the theatre,’ he writes, ‘here is how it would begin. . .’ Ever since Louis’s debut novel The End of Eddy (En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, 2014),the writer has pushed against the limitations of his medium, in particular its reach and its potential to instigate change. He has since jumped between forms, his work being heavily... [read more]
