Laurent Mauvignier, trans. Daniel Levin Becker, The Birthday Party
reviewed by Lucy Thynne
Of his need to write, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane is direct. The compulsion is not always there, he says, but ‘time and again the need has come back — the need to put into words some complex pattern of feelings and imagery. They comprise my Holy Trinity: images, feelings, words. Those three are the basic components of my universe, the sub-atomic particles of all that matters — images, feelings, words.’ Reading Laurent Mauvignier’s latest novel, The Birthday Party,... [read more]
Nicholas Royle’s Manchester Uncanny tells us more about people than places. What makes this short story collection most interesting are its unreliable, humdrum narrators and eerie changes of perspective, reflecting the historical-urban splice of the city behind them. The collection contains three new stories along with a compilation of previously published work. Though a few stories do not fit in as well, a general malaise pervades the work as a whole.
Royle’s narrators are usually men,... [read more]
Kyle Smith, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity
reviewed by Josh Mcloughlin
Jesus told his disciples: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 16:24–25). The opening gambit of Christianity is a death pact. Believers in return for giving up their earthly life for Jesus — and for the first Christians, that often meant a grisly death — were promised eternal life in the next. Suffer now,... [read more]
James Wilt, Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy
reviewed by Sam Gregory
In my local in Sheffield, where I’ve lived for 13 years, there’s a tradition whereby anyone who goes on a demonstration can bring their placards to the pub afterwards and hang them on the wall for semi-permanent display. The pub is also a vital hub in the city for hosting political meetings and planning strikes and direct actions — such is the link between a particular strand of British drinking culture and working class politics.
But Canadian writer James Wilt’s new book, Drinking... [read more]
Leonard Cohen, A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories
reviewed by Stuart Walton
'A man has to discover his own responsibilities,' states the narrator of 'Ceremonies', one of the short stories in this posthumous collection of Leonard Cohen's early prose. 'They aren't necessarily the ones he inherits.' It is a measure of the significance of the mature work of a writer that one looks for the premonitory traces of distinction in their earliest, as though the later production gained in stature through being a consummation of the nascent promise. If there is a clear line of... [read more]
I typically approach a posthumous book of poems with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, especially if it’s by a poet whose work I have long admired. On the one hand, it’s great to get the chance to hear a final statement from an important voice. On the other, the conditions of the production of a posthumous book are often complicated, with semi-finished work jockeying for inclusion with more polished pieces, and with no author around to issue a definitive judgement on what belongs or... [read more]
Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
It felt almost subversive, reading Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family in my little hetero-family-centric enclave of east Bristol with my newborn in tow. In the coffee shops I frequent or the children’s library sessions I attend, the very sight of me with this book may very well have ensured that I am banished from future play dates or baby yoga sessions. Lewis, picking up where she left off with her previous book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), acknowledges as much in... [read more]
A constantly shifting constellation of voices, Amnion travels through space and time at dizzying speed in a startlingly complex, dense, and personal exploration of identity and heritage. If one were forced to summarise this twisting kaleidoscope of a publication, it could be described roughly as Stephanie Sy-Quia’s scrapbook of memories, anecdotes, and reflections, charting her family’s history across continents on a journey of self-discovery — but, of course, this would hardly do justice... [read more]
Philippa Snow, Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment
reviewed by Katherine Franco
If you walked into the storefront at 3 Mercer Street on 29 November 1975, you would have received a glass of wine from the artist Lil Picard. You would then have been encouraged to spit this wine on writer Kathy Acker’s naked body. The activity goes by the name of Tasting & Spitting, a performance piece by Picard and starring Acker in Lower Manhattan.
Acker is, of course, pissed at Picard by the performance’s end: for appropriating Acker’s moniker the ‘Black Tarantula’ within the... [read more]
Luke Savage, The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History
reviewed by Luke Warde
Luke Savage begins the first essay of The Dead Center, ‘Liberalism in Theory and Practice’, by describing his first ‘formative’ political memory: the evening of November 4th, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Given who he was and what he represented, this was in itself an event of colossal historical importance. Yet much of Obama’s true significance lay not in what he had just achieved, unprecedented as this was, but in what he promised: a better,... [read more]
