Recent Reviews

“Losing the Nobel” by Laura Esther Woolfson

This essay has been contracted to appear elsewhere and is not available to publish here.

“The Future of Nostalgia: ORHAN PAMUK AND THE REAL IMAGINARY MUSEUM” by Patrick Patrick McGuinness

… There’s a reason why the language of Proust has a tense called the passé simple. It’s because the passé isn’t simple, because a ‘simple’ (by which the French also mean “single”, as in aller simple, a one-way ticket) past is an oxymoron, and because some grammatical tenses, like the passé simple, exist to order Read More

“If This Must Be The Place” by Rachel Andrews

Summer 2014, shower clouds overhead. As we walk the leafy pathway, my child takes my hand. “Why are we here?” “Because some babies died and are buried here.” I don’t tell her then the real reason we have come to this place where they stole the rights to the female Irish body. I don’t tell Read More

“In My Head I Carry My Own Zoo: The Collage Work of John Digby” by Karen Holmberg

A petition appears in my inbox without salutation, preamble, or signature: END CRUELTY TO MOTHS! Each year millions of moths are painfully deprived of their testicles for the making of MOTH BALLS . . . I recall the moment weeks before in John Digby’s studio when I’d asked why I had found so many collages Read More

“African American Arts on the Color Line” by Manthia Diawara

In 2013, I was the moderator, for “Black Portraiture III”, of a conversation with Lilian Thuram, the famous French soccer player, champion of the 1998 World Cup, at the Ecoles des Beaux Arts in Paris. Thuram, who had by then retired from sports, had become a famous “Race Man” in the land of Liberté, Egalité, Read More

“On being passionately moderate” by Will Brett

There are some things we are not supposed to be passionate about, like doing the washing up. Then there are the things we pretend to be passionate about in job interviews, like “managing people” or “creating content”. Then there are the things we are supposed to be passionate about, like love, family and maybe football. Read More

The Unseen (Shortlisted, Man Booker International 2017)

In this entry for the Man Booker International, acclaimed Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen offers an intimate novel which showcases the moving and evocative powers of literature. The Unseen is a book which on the surface, through its accessible and uncomplicated language, seems simple and plain: the lives of a single family living and sustaining themselves Read More

“Faithful traitors: translating ancient texts for the modern age” by Alice Ahearne

In The Task of the Translator, an essay on the dilemmas of translation in the 20th century, Walter Benjamin remarks: The traditional concepts in any discussion of translations are fidelity and license … [but] fidelity in the translation of individual words can almost never fully reproduce the meaning they have in the original. For sense Read More

“Dacha” by Dasha Shkurpela

Somehow everything built in Russia looks as if it has been made by hand. (Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia) If only. As if. What kind of hand? Do you know anything about commonplace dachas, summerhouses of Russian ordinary citizens in that part of the world? The dacha tradition goes back to Tsarist Russia, when it Read More

Fever Dream (Shortlisted, Man Booker International Prize 2017)

“They’re like worms. What kind of worms? Like worms, all over.” Two voices present themselves: one in question, one in answer; a child and a mother, yet sharing no relation. The subject of conversation is unclear, the situation likewise. We know only a sense of unease. As the dialogue unfolds, the child, David, guides the Read More