Reviews

Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest short story collection is packed full of literary treats in case you haven’t read them when they originally appeared in The...

In November 2014, a courageous 21 year-old woman self-published her first collection of poetry. The arresting poems that filled the pages revealed her experience...

Simon Armitage’s new translation of the fourteenth-century poem Pearl follows his energetic 2008 translation of the same anonymous poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green...

In a museful snippet-cum-travelogue published by Lenny Letter earlier this month, Helen Oyeyemi detailed the auto-didacticism that characterized her first visit to Prague, where...

Walking into the Wyndham, the stage takes you by surprise. Alfred Molina sits unmoving, back to the audience, staring fixedly at one of the...

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...

Andrés Barba’s ghostly novella Such Small Hands met with resounding critical success in its native Spain, as well as in the UK and US with English translations by Lisa Dillman, in 2017. Darkly compelling, it was lauded for its unsettling plot and baroque descriptions, blending conventions from Greek tragedy and Gothic literature [...]

The newly refurbished Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House is having its first opera performances with the world premiere of The Monstrous Child,...

Donizetti’s familial, romantic French comedy has its fourth revival in Laurent Pelly’s fabulous production at the Royal Opera House. The opera is about Marie, who...

Death and Other Holidays, Marci Vogel, Melville House, November 2018 Award-winning writer, poet and translator Marci Vogel is the author of the poetry collection At...

Review | End of the Pier by Danny RobinsBy Francis BeckettMike is a successful stand-up comic with his own television show.  His father Bobby...

Elizabeth's Strout's bestselling debut, Amy and Isabelle, announced the arrival of a serious talent. Her second, Abide With Me, went one better. With 2008's Olive Kitteridge she moved from novels to a trickier form: the cycle of interconnected stories. It was that rare kind of book that can reasonably be called a masterpiece, and it won its author the Pulitzer prize [...]

Hannah Lowe’s fourth chapbook, The Neighbourhood, begins with a winding dotted line that travels from the first to the second page. The image continues...

In 1959 Yves Klein wrote: “blue has no dimensions.” For him, all other colours could be relegated to specific associative ideas that they arouse....

Sally Rooney’s long-awaited second novel “Normal People” burst onto the scene last month, and has been making waves in the literary world since its...

By Charlie AllenJames Cook: The Voyages, British Library, 69 Euston Road, NW1 2DBIt is appropriate that an exhibition about nautical exploration should take place...

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 [...]

Relic is a new body of work by British artist Jake Wood-Evans, presented by the Hampshire Cultural Trust, in collaboration with Unit London, at the Discovery Centre, Winchester. Comprising 17 of his works in total, the show draws upon themes of mortality, the formation of memory, and religious experience. Wood-Evans cites a variety of influences from the European canon of art, including J.M.W Turner, Peter Paul Reubens, and Titian [...]

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...

 It is hard for those brought up in a world of gender fluidity, with debates about who has the right to use which bathroom,...

The outer layer of your skin, the epidermis, replaces itself every 35 days. Become a vegetarian, better yet a vegan, and soon enough your...

Guglielmo Alfarone for "Art Comes Alive at Ping-Pong Dim Sum"“What happens tonight is a surprise for me as much as it is you… I...

In chapter 5 of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities the protagonist Ulrich sets about restoring a house he has just bought:

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, performed at the Donmar Warehouse, Directed by Josie Rourke, Wednesday 18th December 2013 Loyal to Shakespeare’s ‘noisiest play’, the Donmar Warehouse brings us...