This is a tiny book. A tiny red book. It’s described as a novella, but feels pleasingly like a monologue, or something in an oral tradition. As an object, I liked the book’s attention to detail: ‘Cover design and layout dedicated to Reclam, Universal Bibliothek’. Something ‘fuck you’ and something of the scholar. And there’s a playful comment by Stewart Home on the back, calling Takeaway 'a cynical low-life cocktail that will make you retch.’ Home is an artist, filmmaker,... [read more]
'In grief, nothing stays put. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats.' Equal parts essay and memoir, CS Lewis's A Grief Observed (1961) is an experiment in expression. How does the writer find a voice in the face of personal, private grief? Can narrative be an act of healing?
The answer for Lewis came in the form of curation. Compiled from the notebooks he kept after the loss of his wife, poet Joy Davidman, A Grief Observed sees Lewis... [read more]
Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? Essays
reviewed by Neil Griffiths
Marilynne Robinson’s great gift to the novel is characters of goodness, kindness, grace. Her gift to the essay is moral rigour, mental toughness, self-reliance; she seldom relies on the words of other writers, and you will look in vain for a footnote. In the end, she is just too damned serious to resort to quoting Wittgenstein at the first opportunity. There is also something austere in her sentence-making, her argumentation. As King James’ Bible might say, it is sufficient unto itself.... [read more]
Georgia Blain, The Museum of Words: a Memoir of Language, Writing and Mortality
reviewed by Gareth Carrol
Georgia Blain was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2015. Just 13 months later, at the age of 51, she died. The foreword, written by Georgia’s partner, Andrew, lays out the bare facts of this. From the start there is no illusion that this is a tale with a happy ending, but Blain’s illness does more than just take her life. She has a tumour located in the left frontal lobe of her brain – an area that plays a vital role in how we produce language. The tumour, before it has even proved fatal,... [read more]
It is still a commonplace that major prize-winning novelists are writers who, broadly speaking, work within the conventions of realism. Their novels win prizes when this realism is animated by formal or stylistic embellishments whereby the storytelling artifice becomes either passively incorporated, via ‘literary’ language, or actively incorporated, via the techniques of metafiction, such as staging the writing process in the work itself. It is through the deployment of such techniques that... [read more]
Eli Davies & Rhian E. Jones (eds.), Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women That Love Them
reviewed by Thom Cuell
We all have our guilty pleasures – the songs that we can’t help singing along to, even when we’re trying not to think too hard about what the words are actually saying. There comes a time, though, when we are forced to make decisions about the art we consume, and what it says about us as individuals. In many ways, the dilemma facing the consumer of culture is the same as that of the high street shopper: do we boycott artists who contravene our personal ethics and attempt to patronise... [read more]
Phoebe Giannisi is one of Greece's foremost contemporary poets and Homerica – originally published in 2009 – is her fifth collection. But it is her first to be translated out of her native Greek, initially into German and now into English in this artful edition from World Poetry Books which places the original Greek side by side with Brian Sneeden's English translation.
It is easy to see why Homerica has gathered international momentum. The book is a breathless, obsessive attempt to... [read more]
Damon Krukowski, The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World
reviewed by James Cook
In 1972, John Berger published the hugely successful Ways of Seeing, a collection of seven essays on how to better understand art and the visual image. Damon Krukowski’s first book, The New Analog, does something similar for the perception of sound in a digital age, and deserves to be equally successful. Indeed, its title could easily have been ‘Ways of Hearing’. Like Berger, Krukowski is reflecting on a period of recent change – in the case of sound, the paradigm shift from analog to... [read more]
David Widgery, Against Miserabilism: Writings 1968 – 1992
reviewed by Matt Myers
David Widgery was many things. He was a writer, a doctor, a father, a socialist – as the essays in Against Miserabilism ably show. But what is more, Widgery was a man who offered his considerable talents to the service of others; his life found meaning in the common struggle for a most just and humane society. As he wrote in the preface to Preserving Disorder in 1989, the last collection of his essays to be published: ‘I’m glad I heard Hendrix live but gladder to have marched with the... [read more]
Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix (eds.), Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night
reviewed by Stuart Walton
That the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Hate, as the high-water mark of 1977 came to be known, passed without much overt commemoration of the British punk movement says something more than that there was no burning desire to remember it. It speaks eloquently of the relation that punk rock already had with its own afterlife, even during its rapid maturation. Acutely conscious of the reified institutionalism to which popular music had already long since succumbed in the suffocating forms of... [read more]
