In 2014, essayist Eula Biss took out a mortgage with her husband on a two-bedroom bungalow in Chicago. The experience made her uneasy. On the first page of Having and Being Had, Biss describes how a Mexican woman accompanied by four children, on seeing the front room of the bungalow was curtainless and empty, enquired if the room was available to rent. A moment of intense discomfort.
Lynn Michell (Linen Press, 2020); Pbk £9.99 Writer and publisher, Lynn Michell’s published work spans over 30 years. Michell has produced works of fiction, non-fiction, text books and poetry, much of her work being shortlisted for literary awards. This is her first biography. Its subject, the artist Rosa Branson, was born in 1933 and is Read More
Jill Hopper(Saraband Books, 2021); hbk, 2021) Billed as a memoir of beginnings and endings this is the first book by Jill Hopper, a London based freelance journalist. It joins the growing number of personal accounts of loss and grief such as Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, or Megan O’ Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. Collectively Read More
This little book addresses big themes. It is a serious but engaging essay which invites reflection on loss and the ways we respond to it, individually and collectively, and how these have changed culturally over time. Josipovici tightly structures twelve short sections, each focussing on an aspect of forgetting and its counterpart remembering, weaving them Read More
Lenka Janiurek’s compelling memoir, Watermarks, ebbs and flows through a life shaped by trauma and loss. Beginning with her own birth, ‘I am in water, submerged and suspended’, Janiurek floods the text with densely detailed descriptions of a turbulent life. At six years old, the loss of her mother changes ‘absolutely everything and everyone for Read More
How do you cut into what Elizabeth Chakrabarty terms ‘the Trojan horse’ of the essay? Whether it’s lyrical, discursive, inter-medial, associative, reflective, self-reflexive, or something yet undefined, from the outset of Imagined Spaces, the form is as far from the familiar academic expectation as may be dreamt. What then is this literal try, this attempt, Read More
Former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway explores the delicate intersection of faith and reality in his 31st book. Carefully examining the relationship between religion, belief, and perception, Stories We Tell Ourselves is written as much for others as himself. Holloway feels a path forward, navigating the fallout of a millennia of reading our species’ stories Read More
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, an inventive mining of the darker side of folk and fairy tales, was hailed in 2018 as one of 15 books by women ‘shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.’ Her memoir, In the Dream House, offers Read More
‘Antlers of Water’—the phrase is MacCaig’s—and for several reasons it’s an apt title for this new anthology of ‘Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland’. That craggy map. A land that is as much water, as land. Those antlers, perfectly seen by the poet, delve deeply into what it is to live in Scotland. Read More
The essay’s star is in the ascendant. While there has been a long—even noble—tradition of essay writing going all the way back to Montaigne’s Essais, many people associate essays with classroom forms of assessment. Yet, of late, more writers have felt emboldened to call their prose ‘essays’. Make it Scream, Make it Burn is a Read More