‘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?’.
Review | Mummy Issues by Katie Tobin
‘Minor gripes aside, Mother State is an impressive paean to the expansive possibility of motherhood, of new ways of being and living.’
Katie Tobin reviews Helen Charman’s Mother State.
Review | Poor Art, Rich Rewards by Daisy Sainsbury
‘Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements that so quickly lose their revolutionary value and are subsumed into the institutions they originally set out to critique.’
Daisy Sainsbury reviews ‘Arte Povera’.
Review | Formal People by Hester Styles Vickery
‘Conversations around her work centre on her significant success, her Marxist politics, but rarely her technique. Rooney’s critics seem reluctant to talk about her sentences, which is unfortunate, because the sentences are very good.’
Hester Styles Vickery reviews Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.
Review | A Competition Without Rules by Guy Stagg
‘O’Neill’s true target in Godwin is not the excesses and abuses of the modern football industry, but the little lies with which the characters serving that system justify their crimes.’
Guy Stagg reviews Godwin.
Review | The Unravelling Tragedy of Untold Lessons by Esmee Wright
‘Tanet is trying to write something that can’t be so immediately defined, somewhere between a true-story narrative – without the exploitative pitfalls of the genre – and a child’s fantasy story with real-world consequences.’
Esmee Wright reviews Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet.
Review | Looking for Daffodils by Anna de Vivo
‘Both women are potters who haven’t made anything, and both women become disillusioned by the empty promise of an artistic career.’
Anna de Vivo reviews Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman.
Review | Different Trains by Declan O’Driscoll
‘For him, history is an ineluctable force, delivering death to those he has known and loved, even when they have not engaged directly in its actions.’
Declan O’Driscoll reviews Winterberg’s Last Journey and The Trains Of Europe.
Review | Beyond Constructed Film Sets by Sara Quattrocchi Febles
‘Once he’d take the required photographs, he’d move around the set like an angel. No one would see or notice him. He managed to camouflage himself to capture the perfect moment.’
Sara Quattrocchi Febles on Sergio Strizzi at The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
Review | Dreamland Laid Bare by Miracle Romano
‘In this chaotic admixture of miserable players, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between aggressor and victim. This leads to the chilling thought that when injustice is empowered and left unchecked, corruption becomes a cycle.’
Miracle Romano reviews Ronaldo Soledad Vivo Jr.’s The Power Above Us All.
Review | Grapes of Wrath by Charlie Taylor
‘Experience is one thing, but facing the cold facts of the world’s material processes is something else.’
Charlie Taylor reviews Munir Hachemi’s Living Things.
Review | Ex on the Beach by Marina Scholtz
‘For a book to be a truly good reissue it should seem outrageous and unjust that it fell out of print in the first place, and Ex-Wife is exactly that.’
Marina Scholtz reviews Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife.
Review | In the Eye of the Storm by Callum Tilley
‘It is not displaying tension between styles, but rather the artistic absorption of them.’
Callum Tilley reviews In the Eye of the Storm at the Royal Academy.
Review | Blue Correspondents by Oluwaseun Olayiwola
‘For all the shagginess of its visual form, from the actor’s remarkable ability to clip presence from scene to scene, to the visual grandeur of the stage’s concomitant nuts and bolts, it is a suave progression of circumstance and feeling.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola reviews Bluets at the Royal Court Theatre.
Reviews | Kafka’s Sentence by Jack Barron
‘Just as there are good and bad interpretations, there are simply good and bad misinterpretations, and discriminating between them is the key to seeing Kafka’s obscurity clearly. ‘The Metamorphosis’ is as much about unimaginability as it is boundlessly applicable allegory.’
Jack Barron reviews Kafka’s Diaries and Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka.
Review | The Radical Vision of Pedro Lemebel by Esmee Wright
‘I hope that, with this collection, the anglophone world will continue to expand its interest in world literature; not just the foreign, but the queer, the poor, the almost untranslatable.’
Esmee Wright reviews Pedro Lemebel’s A Last Summer of Queer Apostles.
Review | Clare Best’s Beyond the Gate
John O’Donoghue Clare Best’s Beyond the Gate . Beyond the Gate, Clare Best, (Worple Press, 2023), 88 pages, £12 .…
Review | This Rotation of Buttocks by Magnus Rena
‘If the space you live in is beholden to a landlord, then that space is not really yours, and with every day that you spend in it a sense of alienation is cemented.’
Magnus Rena reviews ‘The Lodgers’.
Review | Literary Posters: The Birth of an American Visual Culture by Louis Harnett O’Meara
‘This was the fate of the literary poster; brief but seminal, its visual motifs, techniques and advertising innovations were quickly absorbed into new mediums.’
Louis Harnett O’Meara on The Art of the Literary Poster.
Review | Pulling a Stunt by Lucy Thynne
‘‘In this meeting of darkness and light,’ Cusk writes, ‘was a beginning.’’
Lucy Thynne reviews Parade.
Review | The Partial Truth by Rowland Bagnall
‘The Vast Extent offers a thoughtful exploration of believing and its origins, considering not only how ideas are formed but how they come to be revised.’
Rowland Bagnall reviews ‘The Vast Extent’ by Lavinia Greenlaw.
Review | The Spirit of the Times by Patrick Cash
‘A very physical and evocative portrayal of the town is built, even if a more beautiful story perhaps hides in its shadows.’
Patrick Cash reviews Pity and The Night Alphabet.
Review | Anthony Oliveira’s Queer Retelling of the Bible by Esmee Wright
‘To the enigmatic prose of the Bible, Oliveira layers meaning upon those ruins, not to move the story on, but to give voice to the unspoken fear.’
Esmee Wright reviews Anthony Oliveira’s Dayspring.