Eeva Kilpi (translated by Donald Adamson) (Arc Publications, 2014); pbk, £9.99 Eeva Kilpi has herself remarked that her works have three main themes: the evacuation from Karelia where she was born, relationships and nature. These themes are prominent in A Landscape Blossoms Within Me, which consists of 70 poems chronologically arranged and meticulously translated from Read More
Woody Allen’s yearly addiction to making films continues. As anyone who follows Allen’s work knows, its quality has been steadily dropping as the years pass. Since the millennium there have been only a few gems hidden amongst a sea of mediocre, dull or downright bad movies. How does Café Society stack up against expectations, then? Read More
Kevin MacNeil (Polygon, 2016); pbk. £9.99 On a small Outer Herbridean island, the tiny community is obsessed with literature and plagued by social divisions. Everyone writes, the traditional greeting is “what are you working on?”, and once a year they host the Brilliant and Forever literary festival. The Brilliant & Forever is an unabashedly weird Read More
Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith (Arc Publications, 2015); pbk, £10.99 In his introduction to this collection, Iain Galbraith notes that “a poem, we might hazard, is a highly sophisticated instrument for the measurement of, and ingress to, the real in all its dimensions.” This maxim exudes aptness, especially when applied to the wonderful variety Read More
Ottessa Moshfegh (Jonathan Cape, 2016); hbk: £14.99 Ottessa Moshfegh has won the Plimpton and Fence Modern Prizes for her shorter fiction, and her debut novel Eileen is now lined up for the Booker. One might ask what allows this author to dive in at the deep end of critical acclaim. If Eileen is anything to Read More