Few books have transformed a poet’s reputation as dramatically as Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror transformed John Ashbery’s. Published in 1975, Ashbery’s seventh full-length collection brought him the widespread critical approval which the previous six had not, sweeping the major poetry prizes and selling a remarkable number of copies for a poetry book written by someone not called Ocean Vuong or Rupi Kaur. [read full essay]
There’s a moment near the beginning of Federico Falco’s The Plains where the narrator, tired after a day of digging and planting his garden, has a rest. It’s January, near Zapiola in Buenos Aires province, on the pampas — the vast, flat grassland that spreads in a shallow half-moon from the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay into the South American continent. The narrator relishes the inactivity: ‘the pleasure of not doing anything, semidarkness at siesta hour, reclining to read on the floor, bare back against cold tiles’. [read full essay]
Nightjars are a family of birds that have conjured a foreboding image in literary and folkloric imaginations. Thomas Hardy in his poem ‘Afterwards’ imagined them carrying his soul away ‘in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, / The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades’ (‘dewfall-hawk’ is a Dorset name for the bird). Their nicknames include ‘corpse fowl’ and ‘goatsucker,’ the latter from the belief that they are vampiric, feeding on goats and poisoning them in the process. [read full essay]
Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported a surprise 0.1% contraction in the UK economy. This year's list mirrors this trajectory. With 14 contributors, there has been a modest 6.67% decrease in output from Q4 2024; however, economic doomers ought to bear in mind that these are still historically high levels, only exceeded in 2022 and 2024. What trends have shaped our literary 2025? [read full essay]
For much of his career, Levé was known primarily as a photographer, and his form of choice was the photo-series. He made obsessive use of what Zadie Smith calls, in an essay on Levé published in Harper’s, the ‘deferred term’: the absence that structures the aesthetic field, nowhere visible in the frame but for this very reason determining our experience of every object within it. In the series Rugby, for example, Levé depicts men’s bodies tangled up together in piles; thanks to the title, we can recognise this scene as a scrum, and the men as players grouped around an invisible ball. [read full essay]
Written as the exhibition text for Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time, exhibited at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book is less a companion than an accessory to the film, a kind of textual bauble that draws attention to itself rather than clarifying anything about the work it ostensibly accompanies. This disjunction can’t be accidental — Kan-Sperling refers to Little Pink Book in an afternote as a ‘perverse mistranslation’ of In Her Time, a phrase that gestures toward irreverence. And it saturates the text: ornamentation isn’t a flourish but the only mode of engagement. [read full essay]
Serious effort is being made on both sides of the Atlantic to promote Coll not merely as an ‘unjustly neglected author’, or an ‘eccentric, hermetic writer’ — the stock role of the rediscovered 20th-century genius — but as the very paradigm of belatedness itself, of isolation itself: the writer with an audience of one. If this critical-marketing strategy draws more readers to Coll’s extraordinary novel, I’m all for it. But I also want to suggest that it runs the risk of obscuring another, potentially more interesting way of understanding his project. [read full essay]
On October 9, 2024, a year after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, the New York Times published accounts of what 65 American doctors, nurses, and paramedics saw while working in Gaza’s hospitals during the following year of siege, slaughter, and famine. One type of medical issue that repeatedly occurred was children with gunshots to the head or left side of the chest. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the article’s author — who worked at a hospital in Khan Younis for two weeks — told another doctor who had also worked there, after returning home. ‘Yeah, me too,’ that doctor responded. ‘Every day.’ [read full essay]
A while ago, I went to Café Oto in Dalston, North London, to hear some Jeremy Prynne. The reading, imaging and playing were each eloquently curated and performed; there settled that head-nodding seriousness of the avant-garde; the audience’s deep silence was strictly — and self-imposedly — maintained. And yet, some minutes into the first reading, it became hard not to laugh. [read full essay]
It is undeniable that few Anglophone film critics of the last 50 years have been as humble, curious or open-minded as Rosenbaum. No widely-read American critic has maintained as close a relationship with the critical and cinematic cultures of Europe and Asia, or has been a more consistent enemy of a culture at home that derives profit from the closing of minds. But the culture Rosenbaum inveighs against is also the one whose critical avant-garde he has ended up representing. [read full essay]