Outraged that a certain state-sponsored prize is beneath him, he declares that ‘no prizes are an honor . . . the honor is perverse, there is no honor in the world. People talk about honor and it’s all a dirty trick, just like all talk about any honor.’ So why not decline it? ‘I’m taking the money, because people should take every penny from the state which throws not just millions but billions out the window on a yearly basis for absolutely nothing at all.’ He goes to the ceremony, listens as the Minister of the Ministry of Culture, Art, and Education mislabels him a foreigner, declares that one of his books takes place ‘in the South Seas’ — as risible an idea of a work by Bernhard as can be — and our author takes the lectern, legs shaking with rage. [read full essay]
At just 28 years old, James Marriott has already established himself as essential reviewer and columnist. Deputy literary editor at The Times for three and a half years now, he has risen to prominence for the intelligence of his criticism and his emotional candour about millennial life. I spoke to him about contemporary fiction, his preference for sincerity in literature and what it’s like to write for a Boomer audience as ‘The Times’s Favourite Millennial’. [read full interview]
Ostensibly, the self-destructive sad girl trope claims to use suffering as a tool for resistance and political agency, but all too often it in fact perpetuates an exclusionary white girlhood, which uses emotional pain to mask material privilege. Chris Kraus may proclaim herself a ‘female loser’, but really she’s a landlord. Olivia Laing bought a sprawling Suffolk house replete with walled garden because her Cambridge property simply had ‘no room for fruit trees’. Audrey Wollen’s parents are film theorist Peter Wollen and writer, critic and co-director of the CalArts Program in Art, Leslie Dick. Phoebe Waller-Bridge descends from titled nobility on both sides of her family. These women are set up for success. So why in the works that they create, do they insist on portraying themselves, or versions of themselves, as sad, dirty failures? [read full essay]
Kafka wrote that ‘the meaning of life is that it stops’. The line comes to mind with a clacking sound in my sleep in the middle of the night, and I burst into tears. Unconsciously at first, over the following days I become more sensitive to the life around me: my daughters’ laughter (how would they cope with the loss if something happened to me), my husband’s affection (does he know enough meals to cook, or where the kids’ summer clothes are stored, and should I add him to the parents’ WhatApp group just in case), my unfinished essays (this was one of them). Even when I’m scared for my life, I still try hard to plan ahead, to have control. [read full essay]
Styled ‘part countercultural history of England, part ghost story, and part magickal psychogeography’, Sharp’s preface to the Collection clarifies its literary objective: ‘to fecundate a strain of visionary fiction from the animated exploration of landscape and history.’ Mapping the nation through a series of occult pilgrimages to sites haunted by the ghosts of dead writers, artists, and directors, abandoned military sites and the loci of crime, conspiracy, and mystery, Sharp turns England into ‘an arena’ for ‘an open-ended and ludic ritual in all dimensions.’ The result of this ‘visionary field report’ is a ‘counterfeit of history’: a diabolical Ordnance Survey that resounds with hieratic dirges, satanic hagiographies, uncanny connections, and eerie laughter. [read full essay]
Coined by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974 when, after an extended period of working long hours, he found himself incapable of experiencing joy, ‘burnout’ has become a buzzword in recent years. An enervating psychic state marked by emotional exhaustion, a pervasive sense of futility, and the depletion of empathy, care and compassion, the condition is now frequently used as an umbrella term for the cognitive damage and distress wrought by the conditions of late capitalism. Indeed, according to Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, it shouldn’t be understood as ‘an affliction experienced by relatively few . . . but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition.’ [read full essay]
Small press titles feature prominently in our contributors' 2020 books of the year, which include titles published by Fitzcarraldo, And Other Stories, Galileo and Hyperidean Press. This year’s selection ranges from the ‘teeming Victorian picaresque’ of Owen Booth’s All True Adventures (and Rare Education) of the Daredevil Daniel Bones to the ‘terminal existential angst’ of Udith Dematagoda’s Horizontal Rain, a ’vivid portrait of romantic misadventure . . . full of melancholy insights into the state of modern masculinity’; it includes a treatise on whales, an experimental history of medicine and a new translation of C.P. Cavafy’s poetry collection, The Barbarians Arrive Today — ‘the ideal volume for being socially distant with’. [read full essay]
Labour’s failure in the 2019 election stemmed from a misreading of the political map. The North punished Westminster for austerity by voting for Brexit, duped by a Leave campaign ‘wrapped [. . .] in social-democratic colours’ and forgetting it was the EU’s Regional Development Fund that invested in the North while it was left to rot by the coalition. As Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings played to the gullible Northern galleries, John McDonnell ‘devoted most of his energy to placating opinion in the City rather than popularising Labour’s economic programme in the regions’. Labour blocking the withdrawal bill was the final straw: the Conservatives gained an unprecedented number of seats in the North, causing the so-called ‘Red Wall’ to crumble. [read full essay]
Sam Pink’s fiction documents the quotidian routines of people working jobs they hate while finding unlikely moments of grace along the way. In a review of Pink’s novellas The Garbage Times and White Ibis for The New Republic, Michael Friedrich writes that the two works ‘are about coping with daily struggles and pushing out of complacency.’ The first time I saw Pink read, he went on a long digression about the 1990 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Lionheart. All of which is to say that Pink can be hauntingly complex when he wants to — but he also understands the value of the gloriously random. [read full essay]
Writing sex has always been an elusive aspect of literary art. In the 18th century, it was an offshoot of the nascent novel itself, before disappearing from view in the Victorian age. When it explicitly re-entered literature in earnest with Lawrence and Joyce, it had the function of documentary realism, even where cloaked within elaborate aesthetic codes, as in the Circe chapter of Ulysses. Superseding this forensically unsparing approach, it has since gradually recovered something of the culinary function it enjoyed in the Georgian era, where finely detailed depictions of sexual congress that have had their sensual materiality restored to them play a similarly appetitive role to Lucullan descriptions of food and drink. Each ought properly to stimulate the sensual imagination of the recipient, but there is no evading the fact that a well-crafted narrative of sex should also make the reader want to masturbate. [read full essay]