‘History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.’
Joseph Williams reviews Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.
Review | On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist 2025 by Dominic Leonard
‘It is easy to bemoan the quality of poetry’s decline, when in fact the quantity of good stuff published each year has stayed relatively constant, if you know where to look and whose judgement to trust.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.
Review | Famous Heaney by Jack Barron
‘Both his Poems and Letters, in different registers, show a private poet courting lyric publicity and cultivating a voice of guarded ambiguity: memorable, yes, but sacrificing true risk for renown.’
Jack Barron reviews Seamus Heaney’s collected Poems and Letters.
Review | Fictionally Speaking, True by Hassan Akram
‘Smith is an excellent dissector of power and identity, but conventional party politics are not in her line.’
Hassan Akram reviews Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive.
Review | Most Men Are Losers by Guy Stagg
‘While toxic figures with millions of online followers dominate the cultural conversation about masculinity, Szalay’s novels offer a more honest account of male experience. In short, most men are losers.’
Guy Stagg reviews David Szalay’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Flesh.
Review | To Go Through the Raskolnikov Process by Hugh Foley
‘The result is beyond his competence as a writer, but it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to channel alt-lit’s commitment in new directions.’
Hugh Foley reviews Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man.
Review | Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood
‘Lockwood is taking the real and slipping it through genres in her efforts to capture it, resulting in a portrayal more authentic than straight fiction or memoir.’
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay reviews Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You.
Review | The Quest for Satisfaction by Lee Hatsumi Mayer
‘Satisfaction, the novel suggests, is commingled: it is either heightened or diluted by the emotions of those around you.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer reviews Kathy Wang’s The Satisfaction Cafe.
Review | The Shadow at Evening by Patrick Cash
‘The much-lauded style of Hollinghurst’s prose is abundantly present, with an elegance in the sentences that never obscures the pull of the narrative.’
Patrick Cash reviews Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings.
Review | Look with a Capital L by Joseph Williams
‘Charming and funny, warm and inquisitive, the reflecting Dyer provides a page-turner that entertains you just long enough to forget the sad fact of it all, that even camera-less pictures warp and fade.’
Joseph Williams reviews Geoff Dyer’s memoir, Homework.
Review | Use the Words You Have by Kimberly Campanello
‘Use the Words You Have is not just a novel of desire. It’s a meditation on the nature of language itself.’
Bruce Omar Yates reviews Kimberly Campanello’s debut novel, Use the Words You Have.
Review | Becoming a Two by Lucy Thynne
‘In the diaries’ dailiness, they allow for capaciousness, an expression – as with a regular routine of writing – of a relationship’s good days and bad.’
Lucy Thynne reviews Helen Garner’s Collected Diaries.
Review | Art as Archive by Meesha Williams
‘Where dominant narratives and imagery tend to sanitise motherhood, all white sheets or postpartum glow, Gore’s depiction is tender and painful in a way that feels truthful.’
Meesha Williams reviews Sylee Gore’s Maximum Summer.
Review | ‘Song is a strong thing’: On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist by Dominic Leonard
‘Whether in subject, form, style or quality, a shortlist can at least set out the stall of contemporary poetry and say: this is, for better or worse, what’s going on.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.
Review | ‘They, too, are singular’: On Twins by Nicola Healey
‘Viney’s exhaustive and detailed study, encompassing the uses of twins in myth, literature, art and science, searches for ‘how twins fulfil and defy these and other expectations’.
Nicola Healey reviews Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins by William Viney.
Review | Eyes that Have Seen by Sylee Gore
‘The defining sensibility of Cole’s visual argot is a timeless ephemerality. His photographs twin the incidental with a profound belief in beauty.’
Sylee Gore reviews Pharmakon by Teju Cole.
Review | Suspensions of Disbelief by Stuart Walton
‘Eire’s aim in this capacious, deeply researched and often perplexing book is to account for episodes of the miraculous from a historian’s perspective, seen through the retrospective lens of what has become known, if not universally, as the post-secular age.’
Stuart Walton reviews They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire.
Review | Belonging to the Dead by Gary Kaill
‘Two recently published novels embrace ‘death is not the end’ as both axiom and narrative foundation stone, and traverse the great beyond to dizzying effect.’
Gary Kaill reviews The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino & It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken.
Review | Bolaño’s Exquisite Corpse by Tommy Gilhooly
‘The short stories in this collection cannot, therefore, be read as lesser examples of Bolaño’s novels.’
Tommy Gilhooly on The Collected Stories of Roberto Bolaño.
Review | War and Peace? by Luke Warde
‘There is much in War that compels, especially what it reveals about Céline’s incipient, and already grim, worldview.’
Luke Warde reviews ‘War’.
Review | All Is Not Well by Zadie Loft
‘In the first half, Helen’s pursuit of and infatuation for Bertram seems sweet, comical and harmless; by the second, her actions have been shown to be what they always were: sexual harassment and assault.’
Zadie Loft reviews All’s Well That Ends Well.
Review | I for I: Occupations that Blind by Zoe Valery
‘The writing of Pleasure Gardens – and its reading – constitutes an act of resistance; a reclaiming of the digital narrative space that has been blacked out by the state and overwritten by its propaganda machine.’
Zoe Valery reviews ‘Pleasure Gardens’.
Review | His Words Among Mankind by Suzi Feay
‘Part of the editors’ mission can be crudely stated as pitching a ‘woke Shelley’, a poet who destabilised gender norms and somehow anticipated the concept of non-binary.’
Suzi Feay reviews ‘Percy Shelley for Our Times’
Review | Surveillance in Miniature by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
‘Fatima subtly observes that domesticity – the unit of the family, the capitalist-defined utopia of social togetherness, of selfhood and nationhood itself – always depends on the poor who stand outside of it.’
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou reviews ‘Is Someone There?’.