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]
Her use for the novel, it seems, is its formal compatibility with the human relationships which, for Rooney, seem to be the only reason for living. In one particularly dark moment, Peter considers ‘[t]he final permanent nothing that is the only truth.’ Against the vastness and totality of this void, the task remains — for life and literature — the same: to seek out, cling to, and create meaning enough to go on living and to go on being moral. The everydayness of both love and the novel might seem unworthy of such high stakes — both seem, in Peter’s words, to be ‘experiment[s] bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another.’ But Rooney is, as ever, interested also in how small daily miracles make this life seem more bearable than is proportionate. [read full essay]
Following years of stagnating productivity, successive British governments have tried and failed to kick-start growth. Perhaps we could teach the Chancellor a thing or two. The 15 contributions on this year’s list represent growth of 66.67% on last year’s total of nine. This is also a rise of 56.25% on our yearly average of 9.6. [read full essay]
Unknowability is perhaps the great theme of Greenwell’s novels so far: ‘we can never be sure of what we want,’ as the narrator puts it in Cleanness (2020). If there is a single writerly technique that defines all three books, it’s locating with surgical precision the moments where a person reveals some new part of themselves. This motif appears most strikingly in What Belongs To You (2016), when the narrator rejects his lover, Mitko, who responds with the threat of danger: ‘he wore a face I hadn’t seen before. . . I wondered whether it was a face he had just discovered or one he had hidden all along.’ But it’s in sickness that this inscrutability, this division, finds its truest form. [read full essay]
Almost the sole focus of writing about psychotropic intoxicants in the present generation is the therapeutic uses to which they might be put: to alleviate anxiety, depression, the more severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, addictive behaviours, Tourette's, just about anything. Microdosing LSD has evidently brought a sense of human perspective to the android labour in Silicon Valley. We would all be better off, it seems, if we were a degree or two further along the spectrum from the zero point of cold, raw sobriety. We wouldn't need to drink as much. Other people would seem nicer. [read full essay]
Declan Ryan's first poetry collection, Crisis Actor, came out in 2023. His poems are preoccupied with, and driven by, the weight and difficulty of expectation — of ourselves and of others. Ryan draws out the fear beneath expectation and ambition — the terror of stalling or self-thwarting — as he sketches the lives of marginal figures and underdogs who fail to finesse the systems in which they find themselves. Ryan writes these vignettes compassionately but unsentimentally — ‘You have a duty’, he says during our conversation, ‘to not run open-mouthed towards everything’ — and the result is a collection of poems both soft and hard. [read full interview]
Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. [read full essay]
Perhaps the reason my stories are often only brief glimpses of my characters’ lives is because this is my reality as a postal worker. I’m constantly on the move so my surroundings are always in flux. Sometimes I’ll witness the beginning of would could be a fascinating story, but I’ll never see the ending. Sometimes a customer will let me into their lives: we’ll just be passing the time on the doorstep, there’ll be a bit of a connection, they’ll confide in me and I’ll never see them again. [read full interview]
All this tonal detachment can seem aloof, and these days people have plenty to say — often imprecisely — about the aloofness of novels narrated and written by women. It‘s true that much contemporary fiction adopts a distant, drifting first-person perspective, the kind of stance which has often suited the short story in various traditions, but now proliferates in the novel. Precarity makes young adults like Erin and Magee’s Sean into outsiders, but the drifting perspective might also have technological roots. We live most of the time in two places, in the world and on our phones; phones have shaped for us the default mode of knee-jerk, superficial interpretation of other people. [read full essay]