Set in a missionary school in China in the 1940s, In a Land of Paper Gods is a religious novel, not only in content but in form. Rebecca Mackenzie's prose rings with religious sentiment: 'Even at that young age, I knew to bury these bones in the soft earth, to decorate the mounds with feather, shell and twig, to weave over a litany of prayers, calling to Jesus, the River God, the wind.' Hushed reverence, a sort of delicate holiness, almost surrounds the words. The religion within the story... [read more]
‘The whole bent of my nature is toward confession,’ admits the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. It is this tendency towards confession that gives this hugely accomplished debut its poignancy and its emotional incisiveness. Greenwell’s novel is an attempt to confess both desire and shame in order to better unravel the interwoven, psychologically destructive force of these conjoined emotions. It is a tale of unrequited love that seeks to document the potentially... [read more]
Adam S. Miller, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction
reviewed by Elsa Court
Adam S. Miller’s The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction is the first book to address religious language and ideas within the work of one of the most celebrated of America’s contemporary novelists. If the book has one precedent, a chapter dedicated to Wallace in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011), it makes a strong case against it. Taking... [read more]
Liza Featherstone (ed.), False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton
reviewed by Claire Potter
When Hillary Clinton became the first female Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States on June 6 2016, the theme was women’s history. Secretary Clinton traced her political forebears back to Seneca Falls in 1848, giving a special nod to her mother, who was born the day that women’s suffrage became legal. Clinton’s historic victory was not, she said, ‘about one person,’ but for all the people, past and present, who had worked for this victory. But the debate in the... [read more]
What lies behind the one short and six long poems of David Herd's third collection are the crises that the last decade have precipitated in global migration flows. That is, the vast surge in the numbers of those fleeing civil war, resource conflict and economic collapse to other countries, the increasingly authoritarian and racist character of European and particularly British border regimes, the climate of public xenophobia that increasingly harasses migrants and their descendants, and the... [read more]
Tennis rarely seems to figure among the best literary sports-writing. Baseball and boxing are two well-covered arenas (Gay Talese on the former, in his profile of Joe DiMaggio, for example, and Norman Mailer’s ground-breaking participatory chronicling of the latter). Hunter S. Thompson’s famously wild, kinetic take on the Kentucky Derby for Rolling Stone revealed at least as much about himself as the actual event, memorably conjuring the frenzied scene in his signature Gonzo style.... [read more]
David Clark, Victor Grayson: The Man And The Mystery
reviewed by Ian Birchall
‘Nationalisation of land, canals and railways . . . the eight-hour work day . . . universal education and free school meals . . . abolition of the House of Lords.’ One can imagine the sage, moderate journalists and politicians admonishing us that such ‘extreme’ programmes do not win elections. But in the summer of 1907 it was just such a radical programme that launched Victor Grayson (1881 – 1920) on his brief but spectacular career with a by-election victory in the West Yorkshire... [read more]
AO Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth
reviewed by Daniel Green
In Better Living Through Criticism, AO Scott first of all demonstrates that he is eminently qualified to be the chief film critic of The New York Times. On the basis of what the book reveals about Scott’s breadth of knowledge, interpretive skill, and belief in the importance of criticism, we would be justified in concluding that this own reviews, whether we ultimately agree with them or not, are written from a comprehensive understanding of the history and purpose of criticism and with a... [read more]
Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He was a student of Raymond Williams at Cambridge and has, according to the publicity information from Yale University Press, published more than one book each year for the last 50 years. He is best known as one of the United Kingdom’s foremost public intellectuals, as a very influential Marxist literary critic, and as the author of Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), the... [read more]
Rosie Walker & Samir Jeraj, The Rent Trap: How We Fell into It and How We Get Out of It
reviewed by Tom Gann
In The Housing Question (1872), Friedrich Engels distinguished between the permanent condition of capitalist housing in which ‘the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings’ and its periodic conjunctural intensification. In the late 1860s the ‘sudden rush of population to the big towns’ was the spark for the intensification of the crisis, but there are a range of possible factors that can intensify a chronic housing crisis. These intensifications have two... [read more]
