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]
Katie da Cunha Lewin, The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love
reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli
For the past few years I have been working at the exact same desk in my university library. Every morning I show up at 9am to claim my spot, glaring at any interlopers who so much as glance its way. I unpack my necessary detritus — notebook, KeepCup, grubby sticker-clad laptop — and settle down to work. The desk is university property, but to all intents and purposes, between 9 and 5 on the weekdays, it belongs to me. Friends know exactly where to find me if they need to borrow a charger or... [read more]
Joanna Walsh, Amateurs! How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters
reviewed by Christopher Webb
If you’re reading this, then no doubt you’ve heard the news by now: the internet is cooked.
Right now, it’s difficult to know how — or indeed if — the web will ever recover from the many skirmishes it’s fighting on various fronts (the ramping up of government regulation in certain states, the “enshittification” of private platforms and, perhaps most significantly, the attempts by the AI labs to divert all traffic away from traditional publishers and websites and towards their... [read more]
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
reviewed by Tymek Woodham
The ever-widening gyre of late capitalism requires, in British-American academic David Harvey’s phrase, a fix. The rampant accumulation of wealth constantly threatens to expend itself through the production of self-made crises: the market’s invisible hand has trembled since birth. And just as capitalism seeks ‘spatial fixes’ in the form of national banks, supranational economic zones or temporary forms of fixed capital that ensure the auto-destructive mechanisms of accumulation do not... [read more]
Loren Ipsum is a number of extraordinary things: the daughter of a high-flying architect and a renowned landscape gardener, an alumna of the University of Oxford, a former model, a beloved children’s author, and even a bestselling novelist. Now she is a literary journalist to boot – a writer, that is, who writes about writers and writing (and whose work seems to feature exclusively in publications with names ending in ‘Review of Books’). She is, then, almost a fantasy or parody version... [read more]
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night
reviewed by Jemima Skala
There is a necessary asynchrony to reading Olga Tokarczuk in English translation, an author with so many Polish-language novels in her back pocket, many of which have taken years to come to anglophone shelves. Readers who access her in her original language will have built a more chronological picture of her oeuvre over time; they will, perhaps, possess a knowledge of patterns, tropes, and recurring imagery as it has built on the strength of one novel to the next — her fascination with... [read more]
One of several good jokes in Gabriel Flynn’s debut novel, Poor Ghost!, comes when the narrator, Luca, a youngish man adrift back home in Manchester after flunking out of his Harvard PhD in English Literature, encounters a Manchester-specific table display in Waterstones. His eye is drawn to ‘a new novel by a Mancunian writer named Jonny Fletcher’:
Cotton City. It seemed to be about a DJ who gets drawn into Manchester’s criminal underworld when he begins to research his grandfather, a... [read more]
Hélène Bessette, trans. Kate Briggs, Lili is Crying
reviewed by Rachel Dastgir
After her husband is arrested by the French Gestapo, the title character of Lili Is Crying walks into her local bar. The regulars watch her with measured curiosity. ‘Doesn’t misfortune make a person cry?’ they wonder; Lili is dry-eyed. She orders a glass of white wine before turning to the room and announcing, ‘Things never happen to me the way they do to other people. My life, it’s a whole novel’. She’s right – in a way.
First published in 1953 and now translated into... [read more]
I first encountered Brigid Brophy through Aubrey Beardsley. Brophy had written a book, Black and White, about the artist; I was trawling through criticism of his work for an undergrad project. It’s difficult, sometimes, to dislodge one’s opinions of an artist from the associative conditions you have met them under. With Brophy and Beardsley, fortunately, this was something that worked, as placing them in conversation boded well: two queer, idiosyncratic aesthetes who placed eroticism at the... [read more]
Who has more ease? The robot or the human? In her debut novel To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, Harriet Armstrong returns to this question again and again. The book — the longest release yet from Les Fugitives’ ‘quick brown fox’ collection, a line of English-language originals from a press known for French translations — brilliantly focuses on what it means to simulate emotions vs. to feel emotions. To live with the messy and the nuanced or to find solace in the scripted and rule-based.... [read more]
I confess my interests here are not dispassionate. The covid pandemic stands out to me, but not because of the virus. Instead, I inspected the whites of my eyes, believing them to have turned blue. Visits to the Mayo Clinic, Web MD and NHS websites confirmed my fears: ‘Blue sclera’ is a symptom of a degenerative neurological condition. Within hours, my vision blurred and an ocular migraine came on. Images of the future moved over me, as if I hadn’t been the one to direct them. Blindness,... [read more]
