Asked what his position in the world of letters was, Nabokov replied, with customary wit: ‘Jolly good view from up here.’ His pantheon of major writers was offbeat and exclusive. Pushkin, Shakespeare, Bely and Tolstoy were among those accorded a place, but he was not afraid to spurn an illustrious name – DH Lawrence, Mann, Wolfe, Lorca, Dreiser, Camus, Forster: all ‘second-raters’ – and his animadversions could be delightfully trenchant. Wilde was a ‘rank moralist and... [read more]
Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio (eds.), What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
The cover of this collection of essays announces that ‘millions fear what the future will bring but also dare to dream of a different society.’ No-one would deny the truth of both those propositions. The age of austerity, the latest stage of neo-liberalism’s assault on the majorities of the world, has thrown a curtain across the future, and condemned us to live in a perpetual repetition of an intolerable present. Across the spectrum of official politics, parliamentary parties merge into... [read more]
Daniel Punday, Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology
reviewed by Mélissa Mahi
We live in a time that is more saturated by information than any time before in history. That information is no longer limited to text, but arises out of multiple media. The convergence of audio, video and text in digital culture challenges the traditional role of the written word as society’s primary source of knowledge production. In Writing at the Limit, Daniel Punday introduces us to authors who are ‘eager to understand what makes the traditional novel distinctive among storytelling... [read more]
Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre
reviewed by Belinda Webb-Blofeld
Those already familiar with Jack Zipes will know his seminal scholarly work, Fairytales and the Art of Subversion (Wildman, 1983), of which 2013 marks 30 years since publication. The only problem with creating a groundbreaking work is how to ensure that subsequent works live up to the standard of the earlier success. In The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Zipes sets out to 'demonstrate that the historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing... [read more]
Peter Hallward & Knox Peden (eds.), Concept & Form, Volume One: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse
reviewed by Matt Ellison
The essays collected in Concept and Form, Volume One, many of them appearing for the first time in English, mark the most fruitful period in 20th century French intellectual history. The Cahiers pour l’Analyse was a journal founded in 1966 and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Grosrichard and François Regnault, a group of Louis Althusser’s former students at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. The journal continued Althusser’s philosophical and... [read more]
Ivy Turrow’s debut novel Saying Goodbye to Verena tells the story of Stella, a young woman, who upon declaring herself an economically unviable entity, decides to take her own life and leave all her possessions to her closest friend Verena. The entire book is an account of the two friends' final conversation in which Stella gives her detailed, and somewhat analytical, rationale for her morbid decision. While discussing the reasoning behind her suicide, Stella invokes a multitude of economic,... [read more]
The French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) is best known for his play Ubu Roi, staged in 1896. The play managed to upset almost everyone who saw it, thereby securing a lasting legacy; recently revisited by Tom Jenks and Chris McCabe’s adaptation, Ubu Boris. His life appears to have been a string of anecdotes, many involving guns and pregnant women. A list of those he influenced would be terrifyingly imposing; suffice to say that a major web-archive of the avant-garde is called Ubuweb.... [read more]
Benoît Peeters, trans. Andrew Brown, Derrida: A Biography
reviewed by Marc Farrant
There is something inherently strange, peculiar even, about the 'auto' in 'autobiography'. On the one hand, it implies the automatisation of the self, that one would act autonomously, as oneself, in the writing of oneself (from the Greek autos, 'self'). On the other hand, this action or acting-out would seem to take place automatically, im-mediately, without the mediation of others but also without the mediation of the self; since any act that is purely autonomous, purely an act of the self in... [read more]
Nicholas Royle’s First Novel is a cunning piece of metafiction which blurs the bounds between fact and fiction - a pedantically self-conscious take on the campus novel. Taking inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov’s campus novel-cum-murder mystery Pale Fire (GP Putnam’s Sons, 1962), Royle’s seventh novel follows a creative writing lecturer who may or may not like having sex in cars and who may or may not be a murderer.
The central protagonist, Paul Kinder, is the author of a failed... [read more]
Mike Gonzalez & Houman Barekat (eds.), Arms & the People: Popular Movements & the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring
reviewed by Ian Birchall
The British government is planning an elaborate and expensive commemoration of the First World War for its centenary next year. We shall doubtless hear a lot about what Wilfred Owen called ‘the pity of war’; we may be told that the war was a tragedy, and even a mistake. But I am prepared to wager a substantial sum that we shall hear very little about desertion, mutiny and the shooting of officers. So we should enthusiastically welcome this new book which offers an alternative history of... [read more]
