Philip Mann, The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century
reviewed by Stuart Walton
It is the melancholy of manifest individualism that it proves to be anything but inimitable. What begins as the exquisite crafting of the esoteric persona, initially conceived against the prevailing orthodoxy, becomes reified into a style for others to emulate, and before one has blinked, a whole social movement, or the fleeting fancy of this week, has been generated from the most minute scrutiny of the self. Individualism depends, fatally, on a surrounding milieu of homogeneous conformism, in... [read more]
Who is Oscar Babel?
This refrain from Baret Magarian’s mind-bending debut has been stuck in my head for weeks now, replaying itself in the myriad of accents, guises and disguises it adopts throughout the novel. At first it seems to be a simple question posed by a writer about his new character, but it soon mutates into the PR brainchild of a media mogul, a hushed whisper in a crowd, an intimate utterance of self-interrogation and a whole variety of other distortions. Double, triple,... [read more]
Eli Goldstone’s debut novel, Strange Heart Beating, begins not long after the death of Seb’s wife Leda, who drowns in a London park after an attack by a swan. Is this an encounter with some divine force that cannot resist handing out tragicomic deaths to the women of the Kauss family? Or the ridiculous and sad death of a young woman for no purpose? Seb struggles throughout the book to either create a narrative around his wife’s death or accept it as random and unrelated to the rest of her... [read more]
Hideo Furukawa, trans. Doug Slaymaker & Akiko Takenaka, Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima
reviewed by Dan Bradley
As one of the first literary responses to the Great East Japan earthquake of March 2011, Hideo Furukawa’s new novel is characterised by a visceral emotive power, laying bare the frustrations, despair and hope of one author’s attempt to make sense of unimaginable loss and devastation. It also bears the shortcomings that might be expected from a work produced in only four months.
The inhuman scale of the earthquake, tsunami and accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, where over twenty... [read more]
Nathan Connolly (ed.), Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class By the Working Class
reviewed by Thom Cuell
Conceived in response to media analysis of the EU Referendum, in which the working class was presented by the media as primarily scared, backward-looking, insular and monocultural, Know Your Place gives a platform to working class writers to discuss the impact of class on their own life and work. By doing this, it stands alongside fellow crowdfunded anthologies The Good Immigrant (Unbound) and Nasty Women (404 Ink) in providing a snapshot of the socio-political situation of contemporary Britain... [read more]
Don Jordan, The King's City: London under Charles II: A city that transformed a nation – and created modern Britain
reviewed by Minoo Dinshaw
Charles II’s charm is perilous powerful stuff; even his nightmare incarnation as JM Barrie’s Captain Hook is an endearing sort of villain. ‘The Merry Monarch’’s human approachability, witty phlegm and liberal reputation are heirlooms passed down into the assumed knowledge of the general reader; academic authorities on the Restoration have striven in vain to substitute a nastier piece of work, a would-be tyrant and essay-crisis king. Don Jordan, until recently working with a... [read more]
Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
reviewed by Daniel Green
Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History is a book with a provocative premise addressing an important subject that ultimately does justice to neither. North contends that academic literary study has settled into a stagnant and unavailing practice that aligns it entirely with ‘scholarship’ at the expense of ‘criticism’. Further, the putative goal of this scholarship in a by now thoroughly politicised discipline – to act as a counterforce against the dominant... [read more]
Joshua Ferris, author of three funny, anxious novels about metropolitan loneliness, has released his first book of short stories, The Dinner Party. The collection features a cast of thwarted, pathological men struggling with the addictions and alienations of modern-day America.
The 11 stories, published over a decade (mostly in the New Yorker), are scooped up here into one book. One of the fears for novelists like Ferris must be that their shorter work, massed together, becomes monotonous,... [read more]
What do readers of ‘the erotic novel’ want? In our screen-heavy times, it is intriguing that this most goal-driven of literally genres is having a moment amidst the plethora of downloadable smut. The erotic scribe seeks not just to tell a tale but to get you, the reader, off – if not literally, then at least between your ears, unlike the romantic or literary fiction writer who happens to drop in a sex scene. In The Tryst, the ambitious and confident Monique Roffey adds yet a third layer... [read more]
Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds has received a great deal of praise and attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Described by Andrew Macmillan as no less than ‘one of the most important début collections for a generation’ and hailed by the New York Times for its ‘tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’, the collection has sold strongly, a rare feat for poetry, unless the author attended a famous stage school or featured on a Beyonce album. What is it that has made... [read more]
