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]
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]
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]
Like the works of Primo Levi, or Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide is destined to become synonymous with its subject. In this case, the subject is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the author is 24-year-old Wasim Said. ‘I write it [this book] so I can hang these words around your neck,’ Said writes in the opening pages, ‘to make you bear the responsibility of knowing, the responsibility of being a witness.’ The book is a thoroughly unsparing account of the genocide, detailing just some of the unimaginable horrors every Gazans has had to live with since October 7 2023. [read full interview]
Stillman’s work invites literary comparisons: an avowed Austenite, he cites a constellation of authors as influences. The literary lineage of his films was among a range of topics that we discussed as he carried out a tour of five British cinemas — exhibiting rare 35mm prints of two of his best-loved features. The Whit Stillman Tour, in association with Lost Reels, continues with screenings of Metropolitan at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh (25 July) and the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford (31 July). [read full interview]
‘I used to love blackouts,’ Tim MacGabhann writes in his new memoir, The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting, a stunningly visceral account of the half decade he lost to alcoholism and drugs. ‘The trouble,’ he then qualifies, ‘kicks in when you come back — that hard punch of the breath’s renewed insuck waking up, out of nothing, into being.’ [read full interview]
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]