Reviews

Shitstorm, Fernando Sdrigotti, Open Pen, 2018, £4.99 Among four equally alluring others, Open Pen’s new series of “novelettes” features Fernando Sdrigotti’s latest story Shitstorm, which...

The Minotaur was a key figure in Picasso’s imagination and art, so much so that the artist once remarked that ‘If all the ways...

John Craxton in Greece: The Unseen Works, Osborne Samuel, 23 Dering Street, London W1, 10 May - 8 June 2018 Charmed lives in Greece: Ghika,...

Though Balla, one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary novelists, has been compared to Kafka, he might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret (Israeli author of The Nimrod Flipout and multiple other collections of surreal short stories), given the thoroughly ironic [...]

William Eggleston wrote far better than most writers write. He wrote without words through his portraits as fleeting and resonant as a Carver story....

Jonathan Franzen likes big books. Each one of his critically acclaimed works are weighty door-stoppers but their tangible size in no way matches the...

Want to feel young? Fitzcarraldo Editions – whose small roster of authors includes two of the last five Nobel laureates for literature – is less than five years old. Its first book, Matthias Enard’s Zone, was published in August of 2015, which makes the independent publishing house exactly three months younger than Mad Max: Fury Road [...]

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 [...]

In keeping with the current vogue for entwining fact and fiction, Julian Barnes’s latest novel is a fictionalised account of Dmitri Shostakovich’s un-easy relations...

‘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...

David Constantine’s fifth collection of short stories, The Dressing-Up Box and Other Stories, is ostensibly about loss, conflict and loneliness. His characters are driven to the edge as they struggle to engage with the world and must deal with their suffering. Yet, throughout the collection, the author clings to the promise of hope during turbulent times [...]

The Crypt on the Green in Clerkenwell Close was beautifully lit with fairy lights, and the low chatter of poetry enthusiasts graced the air....

Adam Scovell’s debut novel is narrated by Thomas, a young man who hallucinates the memories of his deceased mentor, Phyllis Ewans. Phyllis is a...

I’ve always had reservations about reviews that liken books to film. It’s too easy to draw parallels between, say, sweeping visuals, swift or dialogue-driven narrative, and cinematic technique. I’m often left wondering how a novel – the experience of sitting down to read one – can ever really be like cinema [...]

T. S. Eliot was famously wary about artistic interpretations of his poems. In a letter in 1947 to Dale E. Fern, he wrote that...

The Night of the Long Goodbyes, Erik Martiny, River Boat Books, 2020, 282pp, $17.95 (paperback) Erik Martiny’s The Night of the Long Goodbyes is a hugely...

What do we think of when we think of myths? For children, myths are something unquestionable and magical. They present a world removed from...

This autumn the Berloni gallery presents the first London exhibition of Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata’s work since 1978.  The acclaimed artist who is known...

In a recent interview with The Times, acclaimed theatre director Robin Icke said that he walks out of shows at the interval ‘all the...

Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel Neil Roberts, Clemson University Press   As the subtitle to this literary study indicates, Neil Roberts offers a...

Lending books to friends. Reading photocopies of novels while smoking a cigarette. Finding the previous owner's angry scribbles in a second-hand paperback. What comes...

Ghislaine Leung’s Constitution opened at the Chisenhale Gallery on the 25th January 2019. The work explores the notion of withdrawal and dependency, utilising noise-cancelling...

“After all, everyone has fantasies. In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the...

The Inheritance stands at almost seven hours long: Matthew Lopez’s two-part, self-aware epic on the legacy of gay men past-and present. Treating everything from...