Nightjars are a family of birds that have conjured a foreboding image in literary and folkloric imaginations. Thomas Hardy in his poem ‘Afterwards’ imagined them carrying his soul away ‘in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, / The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades’ (‘dewfall-hawk’ is a Dorset name for the bird). Their nicknames include ‘corpse fowl’ and ‘goatsucker,’ the latter from the belief that they are vampiric, feeding on goats and poisoning them in the process. [read full essay]
There’s a moment near the beginning of Federico Falco’s The Plains where the narrator, tired after a day of digging and planting his garden, has a rest. It’s January, near Zapiola in Buenos Aires province, on the pampas — the vast, flat grassland that spreads in a shallow half-moon from the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay into the South American continent. The narrator relishes the inactivity: ‘the pleasure of not doing anything, semidarkness at siesta hour, reclining to read on the floor, bare back against cold tiles’. [read full essay]
Definitions of the word discord normally offer two meanings: the first, a general one that describes a difference or clash of opinions; the second, more specific, names a tension or clash between musical notes. In both, discord sits in assumed opposition to harmony, defined as agreement, be that between people or notes: harmony, good; discord, bad.
Within music, though, the terms meaning is not as simple as dictionary definitions suggest. Most music makes some use of discord to build... [read more]
Deborah Tomkins’ novella, Aerth, starts as it means to go on, in the set of moods grammarians call irrealis — the ways we talk about things that only might happen, such as the conditional, or subjunctive. ‘Had Magnus of Arden stayed home, enjoyed his party, blown out the seven candles on his cake, he would not now be sitting at the top of an oak tree, quietly observing like an explorer.’ The sense of self-cancelling possibility here, neither the real nor the unreal prevailing, is... [read more]
One of the stories in The Kingdom, Yoel Noorali’s debut collection, is about a writer who can’t read. He has produced nine novels, one of them a Nobel Prize winner, by ‘typing randomly, with the letters happening to fall into celebrated sequences of words’. He envies his reviewers and is puzzled by their admiration because the ‘pleasure and wisdom’ they appear to find in his books is beyond him. His 12-year-old nephew, Ben, reads excerpts of their praise, each a perfect parody of... [read more]
Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya, trans. Christine Pichini, Letters to Eugène: Correspondence 1977–1987
reviewed by Rachel Dastgir
The Belgian poet Eugène Savitzkaya was 28 and living in Liège when he was drawn into an unexpected correspondence with a then 22-year-old Hervé Guibert. Guibert had published his first novel La Mort propagande in 1977, an astonishing debut and autofictional novel that described Guibert’s explosive and fragmentary encounters with both death and burgeoning sexuality, and was celebrated by fellow writers including Monique Wittig, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. He was exciting and... [read more]
‘I remember everything,’ Emily LaBarge writes early on in Dog Days, her coruscating debut that is as much about writing as it is about trauma, grief, and the talismans of catharsis. ‘I live by this memory,’ she continues, ‘it forms such a core of my person, what I am able to write, what catches my attention, until all of a sudden there are some things I can’t remember at all.’
What happens when our memory of a certain event, ‘on the twenty-second day of December, 2009, at... [read more]
On the first Sunday of every month, academic and activist Morag Rose can be found walking, wandering, meandering, shuffling, or best of all loitering, down the streets of Manchester with like-minded loiterers of all sorts. Their walks — which have been taking place for 20 years – are guided and not-guided by different games, instructions, motivations, or lack thereof, with an ever-changing group of companions. Each experience of this collective loitering is ephemeral and unique.
Rose,... [read more]
Tom Crowley brings his daughter to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and she goes missing. But all is not as it seems. Each chapter is a monologue, either by Tom Crowley or someone who works with him, such as Kath Corbett, Steve the receptionist, an unnamed Liaison Officer, an unnamed AV technician, and finally an unnamed archivist who is assembling all the material we are reading. Tom Crowley is an angry and frustrated man — we get subtle hints of this when he’s at a train station and... [read more]
Amlanjyoti Goswami’s latest collection A Different Story returns to themes explored in previous work, which I think might be best described as a kind of secular spirituality. Meditations on the beauty of Delhi and the importance of poetry itself are conduits for deep feeling through which the speaker expresses a wish for connection. I have previously suggested that Goswami’s work is concerned with sincerity, but A Different Story clarifies his poetic vision, which I would argue becomes... [read more]
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]
