Review 31 http://www.review31.co.uk An online literary magazine focusing mainly on new academic titles and other serious non-fiction. ‘The World is Funny’: An Interview with Kevin Boniface http://review31.co.uk/interview/view/38/the-world-is-funny-an-interview-with-kevin-boniface 
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. Achievable Miracles: An Interview with Paul Murray http://review31.co.uk/interview/view/37/achievable-miracles-an-interview-with-paul-murray Reading Murray’s latest, <i>The Bee Sting</i>, put me in mind of Tolstoy’s line about how all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It follows Dickie and Imelda Barnes, who are bound together by a tragic death that changed the course of their lives two decades ago, as they struggle to keep their family together. To make matters worse, their two kids, Cass and PJ, are hatching plans to leave home, and Dickie’s car dealership is on the brink of collapse. <i>The Bee Sting</i> is a novel about family, secrets, love, and the lengths to which we’ll go, for better or worse, to protect the ones we love from the truth. It is, above all, a novel about the past and our inability to ever outrun it. 'The Writing Itself Decides': An Interview with Vanessa Onwuemezi http://review31.co.uk/interview/view/36/the-writing-itself-decides-an-interview-with-vanessa-onwuemezi Vanessa Onwuemezi won the 2019 White Review Short Story Prize for her short story, ‘At the Heart of Things’. Her debut collection, <i>Dark Neighbourhood</i>, takes us through the liminal spaces of systems of power, such as borders, hotels or offices in the early hours. The world of this collection warps desires and voices; its themes are alienation, spirituality, family ties, loss. Onwuemezi’s characters are distant from themselves, but rendered fleetingly intimate to the reader through sound, rhythm and image. We talked about poetry and editing, the void, witchcraft and perception. ‘What is a bag?’ (The Lodgers) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/906/what-is-a-bag Holly Pester reviewed by Trahearne Falvey: ‘A ledge of any kind got me going,’ Holly Pester’s narrator declares on the first page of the poet’s debut novel The Lodgers, revealing a childhood fantasy of ‘climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox’ to live a ‘pretend little life’. A life can’t be built on a ledge — it is, by definition, narrow and temporary — but anyone who rents in the turbulent UK housing market will recognise the narrator’s constant searching for something to hold... Awakened Connections (Greek Lessons) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/905/awakened-connections Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won reviewed by Megan Jones: Desire is an emotion Han Kang returns to in Greek Lessons, the fourth of her full-length works to be translated into English, following UK publications of Human Acts (2016), The White Book (2018) and the International Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian (2015). In The Vegetarian, desire manifests as a yearning akin to starvation — the deprivation of meat, of sex, of sustenance. In her latest novel, it takes another form: loss. Greek Lessons returns readers to the metaphorical... The Gift of Misgiving (Something, I Forget) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/904/the-gift-of-misgiving Angela Leighton reviewed by Jack Barron: Angela Leighton’s latest collection of poems — her sixth — comes to us under a sign that dissolves at its edges, inaugurating a finely-tuned vagueness, a structural ambiguity; it is a collection framed by those minor oblivions that dog us all: Something, I Forget. And indeed, within its pages, variations on the theme of memory (and its failures) abound: they are poems that, through their rich emphasis on sound and acoustic patterning, repeatedly describe the fringes of language as it... Because They Wind Us Up (Lovebug) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/903/because-they-wind-us-up Daisy Lafarge reviewed by Vittoria Fallanca: In an evocative passage based around John Donne’s famous poem The Flea, Daisy Lafarge discusses what she terms ‘the difficult meshwork of infection and intimacy’. The flea of Donne’s poem has sucked on the blood of the speaker and his beloved and acts as an opportunity for him to persuade her of a different kind of corporeal exchange. While feminist critiques of the poem note the silence or erasure of the female beloved, for Lafarge this interspecies interaction highlights how our... Something Strange and Distressing (The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/900/something-strange-and-distressing Matthew Bowman reviewed by Alexis Forss: On June 25th 2023, at 13:37 BST, Matthew Bowman became probably the first author in the history of the Yale University Press to have their work plugged by the Daily Mail website. Before anyone starts wondering at the new slant of MailOnline’s TV & Showbiz coverage, here’s the headline: ‘We were abducted by aliens: The unbelievable story of suburban churchgoing couple Betty and Barney Hill, the first Americans to claim they'd been snatched by a UFO.’ This macabre story may endure as the... The Power of Suggestion (The Possessed) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/901/the-power-of-suggestion Witold Gombrowicz, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones reviewed by Gertrude Gibbons: Witold Gombrowicz, Polish novelist, essayist and playwright, observed, commented and critiqued contemporary society and the human condition. His writings are eccentric, unique, and though they are rooted in Poland they extend beyond these borders, held in high esteem by writers such as Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre and Milan Kundera. His first novel, Ferdydurke, published in Warsaw in 1937, caused a stir for its controversial depiction of Polish society. His international recognition grew in... An Unadulterated Celebration (A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/902/an-unadulterated-celebration Joanna Biggs reviewed by Jennifer Thomson: I used to have the Woolfian ideal — money, and a room of my own. Now I have expensive childcare bills to pay, and that room is a nursery. Similar predicaments face the female writers of Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. After Ted leaves, Sylvia is stuck trying to write what will become Ariel whilst caring for two tiny children; Toni sets up her desk in the middle of the house she makes with her two young sons, freshly divorced, so that ‘the writing could... Squeezing the Day (Blood Feather) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/899/squeezing-the-day Patrick McGuinness reviewed by Tim Murphy: There is an adage to the effect that one of the most difficult subjects for a writer is their own family. The idea is that blood ties serve to obfuscate and divert, and thus truthfulness or insight are unreasonable expectations in literary representations of a writer’s own kin. There is, however, a vast body of excellent literature that defies this logic, and this now includes Patrick McGuinness’s first poetry collection for thirteen years, Blood Feather. McGuinness has previously authored... Well Made Austerities (Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Uglines) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/898/well-made-austerities Nathalie Olah reviewed by Alice Brewer: Much of what concerns Bad Taste, Olah’s second full-length book, is traceable to a chapter of her first. Exploring the cultural impoverishments of New Labour and the decade of austerity that followed, Olah’s Steal as Much as You Can (2019) argued that tastefulness should be understood as the uncodified aesthetic of the risk-averse. Her focus was arts programming: how unwilling our middle- and upper-class cadre of editors, commissioners and marketing executives are to take risks in times of... Not All Allegories Are Equal (Beasts of England) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/897/not-all-allegories-are-equal Adam Biles reviewed by Peter Adkins: I’ve always felt George Orwell was hard on sheep in Animal Farm. Presented as a mindless indistinguishable mass, ready to unremember the past and change their allegiances on the slightest of porcine instruction, Orwell drew on farmyard clichés that anyone who has spent five-minutes with a sheep will know to be wrong. Sheep are wilful, resourceful and clever animals, inquisitive and cautious, independent and companionable. Or perhaps, I am the one who is wrong. After all, the beastly... Let Our Voices Mingle (The Poet & The Echo) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/896/let-our-voices-mingle Tom Conaghan (ed.) reviewed by Phoebe Tee: Birdsong caws and chirrups through the stories in Scratch Books’ new anthology, The Poet & The Echo, each of which was written in response to an existing poem as part of Radio 4’s programme of the same name. Harry Josephine Giles’s gothic tale, ‘The Grey Eagle’, whistles with ‘the wicked cries of innumerable gulls’. In Hannah Lavery’s ‘The Idler’, the narrator’s son listens ‘to the birds. Not for the credit, but because they’re singing'. But it’s not only birdsong... Timely/Untimely (Expeditions to Kafka: Selected Essays) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/895/timely/untimely Stanley Corngold reviewed by Meindert Peters: Be warned: you will not be able to escape Franz Kafka in 2024. After the centenary of Marcel Proust's death in 2022, with an exhibition in Paris and several new books, 2024 marks the centenary of Kafka's passing and this will not go unmarked either. The London Review of Books is publishing a special diary, filled with past Kafka criticism from their pages, by authors such as Elif Batuman, Anne Carson, and Colm Tóibín. Oxford scholar (and my colleague) Karolina Watroba will publish a new book... Hold the Pose (Breaking Kayfabe) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/894/hold-the-pose Wes Brown reviewed by Richard Smyth: Some time in the 1980s, the journalist Rick Broadbent interviewed the Halifax wrestler Shirley Crabtree, better known as ‘Big Daddy’, and asked him if wrestling was real. Crabtree sighed and replied: ‘The pain is real.’ This is how we justify our fictions (the formalised dishonesty of literature, the sweaty moral pantomime of wrestling). There’s something in here that’s true, we think, turning life over in our hands, giving it a shake, holding it to our ear. There’s something... A Homecoming (Hangman) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/893/a-homecoming Maya Binyam reviewed by Patrick Christie: After living in America for 26 years, a man returns to his native country in sub-Saharan Africa to visit his dying brother. Both the narrator and the country he is visiting are left unnamed in Hangman, Maya Binyam’s debut novel. Proper nouns in general are missing from the text, with the places and people the narrator encounters given labels such as ‘the yoghurt man’, ‘the town where I was expected’ or ‘my son’s mother’s brother’. Absent too, are any substantive descriptions... Morality and Its Discontents (Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/892/morality-and-its-discontents Life Ceremony reviewed by Tim Murphy: In January 2023, the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, made a speech suggesting that the very existence of Japanese society was being threatened by its steadily falling birth rate. While Kishida said that support for child-rearing was now his government’s single most important policy, it is not surprising that Japanese artists have responded to the demographic situation in sometimes provocative ways. Chie Hayakawa’s futuristic 2022 film, Plan 75, for example, concerns a government... ‘And we were pitiless’ (Private Worlds: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/891/and-we-were-pitiless Jeremy Seabrook reviewed by Charlie Pullen: On 9 January 1969, a new play called Life Price premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square. Starring June Brown, a young actress who would go on to become famous as Dot Cotton in Eastenders, Life Price was about the murder of a child on ‘a council estate in the Midlands’. With its hard-hitting themes and working-class characters, the play owed something to that bold social realist tradition that had emerged in British culture following the Second World War. Over a... Swept Away With Them (The Kentish Rebellion) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/890/swept-away-with-them Robert Selby reviewed by Ben Leubner: Our general sense of ourselves in relation to time has us moving along an x-axis, horizontal, linear, and elongated. To look back into the past is to turn one’s head around, squint, and test one’s power of vision to its fullest, especially if one is trying to discern events from almost 400 years ago. Yet this isn’t the conception of ourselves in relation to time that Robert Selby is working with in his second book, The Kentish Rebellion. Reading these poems, one gets the feeling that... ‘after it all went’ (To 2040) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/889/after-it-all-went Jorie Graham reviewed by Jack Barron: Samuel Beckett was something of a fortune-teller. That is, so much of his textual surface takes place on the pages and stages of uncertain futurity: think, for example, of Endgame’s possible apocalypse occurring without; of the brightening terror of ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’; or of Krapp’s Last Tape, our eponymous clown flitting about his den, enveloped by some ‘late evening in the future’. Beckett will never properly disclose these subjunctive zones, which is their power: their... Ismail Kadare’s House of Mirrors (A Dictator Calls) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/888/ismail-kadare’s-house-of-mirrors Ismail Kadare, trans. John Hodgson reviewed by Bronwyn Scott-McCharen: Ismail Kadare’s latest offering in English is a cross between a game of telephone and a crime scene investigation. The crime: an alleged phone call between the feared Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the famed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, in which Pasternak either bravely stands up for or cowardly denies any connection to his friend and fellow writer, beleaguered poet Osip Mandelstam. In A Dictator Calls, Kadare serves as chief investigator, continually dissecting and revisiting these three... Murder to the Minute (Tokyo Express) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/887/murder-to-the-minute Seichō Matsumoto, trans. Jesse Kirkwood reviewed by William Davies: Since the beginning of the Golden Age of crime writing, trains have provided countless opportunities for excitement and tension. Whether it is trains caught at the very last second, events glimpsed through the windows of speeding carriages, or trains shuttling from the city to the countryside, where, if you agree with W. H. Auden, the best murder mysteries take place, trains have long been a source for drama. Trains can also be their own little worlds of hope and peril. When Agatha Christie put... Intimate Vitality (Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures) http://review31.co.uk/article/view/886/intimate-vitality Caroline Magennis reviewed by Archie Cornish: In Anna Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001), the protagonist Amelia watches as her big sister and a gang of friends deliberately poison themselves. The grown-ups have left the building but there’s not much to do in 1980s Ardoyne. So Lizzie and ‘the Girls’ divide out a ‘twelve-year old nutmeg’ and wash it down with ‘an ancient packet of mustard and a rusty tin of peas’. Amelia watches them laugh in delight as the bad peas explode, ‘one by one inside them’. The violent...