In each tale, guilt goes unrecognised, crime goes unpunished, innocence goes unavenged, and the bad guy gets away with it. The slayings seem pointless and arbitrary, and between this and the absence of retribution, the expected narrative pay-off of a crime story doesn’t arrive. Instead of justice, these men escape punishment either to take their own lives, fret or plan worse things. And instead of clear motives and psychological explication, these tales serve up red herrings. [read full essay]
So, this is an argument of a certain genre: liberal mugged by reality. Perry tells us how she, too, once believed that sexual inequality was due to differences in socialisation, for which the effective remedy must surely be a moral pedagogy aimed at correcting regressive male attitudes and encouraging women to venture forth more boldly into the world. It’s notable that in spite of abandoning this belief, in the face of the egregious and unrelenting harms endured by women at the hands of violent male partners, she retains the underlying faith in moral pedagogy as a means of repairing the world. [read full essay]
As its title suggests, a running theme in Adrenaline is Ibrahimovic’s psychological dependence on excitement, along with his fear of not being able to access this once his playing career concludes. It is certainly tempting to read this book as a high-wire act designed to thrill its author, teetering over terminal opprobrium, just as much as its reader. There is little piety in the book, and very little self-pity: none of its cast is a saint or a monster, just a good laugh or a prick, usually some combination of the two. [read full essay]
The key to Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth, a biofictional novel about Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth and his wild, sprawling family, is buried in the author’s notes at the end of the book: ‘I began thinking about this book during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings.’ She doesn’t say which shootings. This was before the Trump administration (more on that later). Perhaps the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando? Or San Bernadino? [read full essay]
‘I am turning toward a kind of aesthetic mysticism,’ wrote Flaubert in one of his letters. ‘When there is no encouragement to be derived from one’s fellows, when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live.’ Nobody would say anything like that today; it would be too embarrassing. Treating art as a substitute religion — as something absolute that transcends a debased world and is pursued for its own sake, in a spirit of ascetic renunciation — is no longer fashionable. [read full essay]
Strangers I Know, a book about Durastanti’s family history and upbringing between Brooklyn and a small village in the south of Italy, starts off as an autobiography — or, rather, as a reflection on autobiography as a literary form itself — to transform into a shape-shifting text where the work on form and language is an ongoing, deliberate effort. Perhaps precisely because it is from a linguistic rupture that the author’s memories (and this book) originate: being born to deaf parents whilst also having to straddle two languages and places of origin. [read full essay]
Disaffected young men of the Westworld have begun to believe that everything is loaded against them. Their self-respect has been stolen from them, they believe, by women who won't look twice at them. Their innate physical strength and their yearning to take on leadership roles are redundant attributes, while the breakdown of all their relationships is invariably blamed on them. They have willingly become what they never imagined being — permanent victims. [read full essay]
Vanessa Onwuemezi won the 2019 White Review Short Story Prize for her short story, ‘At the Heart of Things’. Her debut collection, Dark Neighbourhood, takes us through the liminal spaces of systems of power, such as borders, hotels or offices in the early hours. The world of this collection warps desires and voices; its themes are alienation, spirituality, family ties, loss. Onwuemezi’s characters are distant from themselves, but rendered fleetingly intimate to the reader through sound, rhythm and image. We talked about poetry and editing, the void, witchcraft and perception.
[read full interview]
What does it mean to connect with someone? What does it mean to see yourself in someone else? Is the former even possible without the latter? It’s potentially a solipsistic way of looking at the world, but then, what’s the alternative? A self-conscious and reflexive engagement with experiences that are ostensibly not our own? That feels worse because it is, to my mind, ultimately inauthentic. It means you’re interested because you ought to be, not because you genuinely are. Understanding and empathy become a moral imperative, not something instinctive, intuitive. [read full essay]
Neuroscience so confidently identifies consciousness with the cerebral cortex — the densely-folded, outer layer of grey matter in mammal brains — that surgeons sometimes question whether children born without one require anaesthetics at all. Yet these children cry, laugh, play, and distinguish familiar from unfamiliar stimuli — behaviours difficult to imagine alongside the total absence of experience. Animals whose cortex has been surgically removed continue to navigate mazes, eat, procreate, and nurse their young; if anything they are more active, and more emotional, than their normal peers. [read full essay]