Mercer's book, Gargoyles, is a memoir of the nightmarish side of sudden, life-threatening illness. Describing her convalescence at Charing Cross Hospital, Mercer follows ‘the thing that slips and slides through the fingers of your mind when you try to pin it down with words.’ Straying to the dark, wounded places of her life, the book is a tale of loss, change and endurance, but joy, too. Mercer celebrates the kindness of family, friends and strangers, and the beauty of the surrounding green-hued world. [read full interview]
The approach of Bob Dylan's 80th birthday has prompted the anticipated flurry of reassessments and revisitations, reflections on the cultural significance of American popular music's prickliest and most defiantly enduring troubadour, revisions of earlier revisionist biographies, another round of genuflections, heartfelt encomia, and the laboured raking of long memories, bitter and bad as well as warm and honeyed. There is more than enough Dylan to go around, and way more than enough Dylanology, and yet who would deny the old stager another moment in a more august limelight than the stuff they sell by the yard these days? [read full essay]
Laurent Binet is a novelist, but also, perhaps, something of a historian manqué. He’s fascinated by the way the raw facts of history become, or are moulded into, narrative(s). A large measure of contrivance and ruse are par for the course. No wonder readers have mistaken him for yet another metafictional chaos theorist, high on Derrida and Barthes. Yet as James Wood pointed out in an extended review of HHhH (2010), Binet’s insurgent early novel, the latter seems sceptical not of history or our ability to document its complexities, but of literature and the value of verisimilitude. [read full essay]
The recent publication of On Care, The Care Manifesto and Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis, speaks to a rapidly growing consensus that, for a while, there has been something awry with the state of care. In varying ways, these books illuminate the breakdown of systems of care, detailing how people are not only being denied the care they need to survive, but also that the present conditions make the delivery of care unequal, difficult and oppressive. [read full essay]
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]