Reviews

Now, Now, Louison, Jean Frémon (translated by Cole Swensen), Les Fugitives, 2018, pp.115, £12.00 Now, Now, Louison, originally published in French as Calme-toi, Louison in 2016, is...

The London Review Bookshop, Bloomsbury, 7pm. Wine glasses clatter as they are placed on the floor, animated conversation fills the air, friends are greeted,...

We live in an era in which we see more images than ever before in human history. When we see these images, in newspapers...

The American West has always been home to grifters and thieves, dreamers and doers. It has been a destination for the misfits, for the...

Chun Kwang Young’s work mixes the traditional, through the use of customary Korean mulberry paper known as hanji paper, with contemporary style, as the...

Circa, written by Tom Ratcliffe and directed by Andy Twyman is meant to be a story about modern gay life. I say meant to,...

"Real danger is never born of anything concrete. There are only words in the beginning," writes Kamala Markandaya. There were 71,251 race-related hate crimes recorded in 2017/18, according to a Home Office report. That’s an average of 195 racist incidents every day [...]

For contemporary fiction to stay pertinent in the twenty-first century, it must continue to do what great novelists have always striven to do: challenge, interpret, and risk offence. Michael Arditti’s new novel The Anointed challenges the ultimate orthodoxy, the Bible – in particular, the ancient tales of the Old Testament, which have endured for thousands of years, despite their capriciousness and morals archaic to the modern reader [...]

Fabulosa! The Story of Britain's Secret Gay Language, Paul Baker, Reaktion Books, 2019, pp. 320, £15.99 (Hardcover)Polari is a language that was used mainly...

‘He’s back in the ghost house where he, himself, is the ghost.’ (‘Broken’) ‘sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in...

Ben Weatherhill wrote Jellyfish specifically for the actress Sarah Gordy, and after seeing her incredible performance at The National Theatre, you can see why....

Christian MarclayBlavatnik Building, level 2Tate ModernUntil 20th January 2019 “Time present and time past”, as T.S. Eliot famously claimed in Burnt Norton, are “both perhaps...

Our age is rich in lyric poetry; no age perhaps has been richer. But for our generation and the generation that is coming the lyric cry of ecstasy or despair, which is so intense, so personal, and so limited, is not enough. - Virginia Woolf, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, 1927

Science and art come together under the inventive hand of GeorgII Uvs in Full Circle: The Beauty of Inevitability. A student of geology gone...

Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte returns to the Royal Opera House in the seventh revival of David McVicar’s incredible production. There is good reason that this...

The New World Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz Granta, £12.99 (paperback)The New World opens grippingly by immersing the reader in the consciousness of Jane, a...

In ‘Cause’, the second poem in Anthony Anaxagorou’s collection After the Formalities, the poet reclaims the phrase ‘flames lambent’ – an image taken from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and quoted by historian David Starkey in a 2011 interview following the London riots – for poetry [...]

Orange World and Other Stories, Karen Russell, Penguin, pp. 288, £14.99 (hardcover)Karen Russell’s third short story collection Orange World is every bit as inventive...

The Fallen is only 136 pages long, but it bursts with resounding voices of unbridled pain. Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s polyphonic novel takes us across a Cuban family, each member with individual chapters — the son, the daughter, the mother, the father [...]

The great strength of this exhibition is its demonstration of the ubiquitous nature of queer art and culture. Timed to remind us that it...

In the increasingly urbanised world in which we live, as encapsulated by 'The Commute', the first poem in Sarah Corbett's latest collection, A Perfect...

“The best way to live in the present is less carefully”: for better or worse, Jeremy Over’s winningly preposterous fourth collection, Fur Coats in Tahiti, follows its own advice to the letter. On the whole, I think, the better wins out, but let’s start by getting some of the worse [...]

For what seemed to be the first time in my life, I was asked to leave my mobile phone on during a performance. Even...

  ‘When I’m painting, I am always aware of a kind of communion with all living things, I mean with the universe as the sum...