Pedro Serrano is an exquisite poet, and this is a collection that sings with virtuosic touches – Serrano’s verse itself, the work of the translator and the scope of the Arc Visible Poets series, which profiles both poet and translator. Parallel text editions are such a pleasure, even if one does not read the original Read More
Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel, The Blazing World, unspools itself messily in the mind of the reader. A tangle of testimonies, it purports to be an academic’s attempt to reconstruct the life of ‘Harriet Burden’, a minor New York artist and widow of Felix Lord, a wealthy art dealer. Lord and Burden – therein lies the Read More
As the first fifty or so pages of Joshua Ferris’ third novel flow easily through the neurotic first person narration of Paul O’Rourke, a dentist consumed with equal parts disdain and longing for normal social interaction, you might suddenly realise, nothing has happened yet. Yet this first section is an absolute delight, bursting with inventive Read More
An unnamed lawyer messes up his professional and by extension private life in New York, and so takes up a job offer in Dubai to escape from it, a venture that ultimately fails. The Dog reads like one gigantic, long-winded anecdote, a fact not helped by its excessive use of brackets (sometimes amounting up to Read More
Offred, in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, passes the execution Wall one day and sees dangling corpses marked with the letter ‘J’ in red: ‘It doesn’t mean Jewish, those would be yellow stars […] So the J isn’t for Jew.’ Howard Jacobson has now built an entire fictional world on this word beginning with Read More
Woody Allen’s films have something of a cult following. Like other directors before him, his name has become more than just a signature on his work; it has become a brand. The recognisable combination of white-font-on-black-background and easy jazz music has the ability to greet fans of his work with a sense of spellbinding wonder Read More
Revivals of First World War literature have been in plentiful supply throughout 2014, though few are as conceptually charged as Trevor Royle’s latest offering. From the “doldrums” of the Kailyard – the rural arcadia that had become intrinsically linked with the nation’s written word – Royle’s introductory essay alleges that war sparked an identifiably Scottish Read More
Jeepers Creepers, a monkey in space! Jesus Christ, they’re electrocuting it! In 1971, Eduardo Paolozzi had his only full retrospective in Britain at the Tate Gallery – it was a flop. Critics proclaimed that his imagery was overused and his ideas stagnant. Now, in 2014, The McManus brings together a selection of Paolozzi’s work from Read More
“I give you the truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.” In the treasure-house of memorable productions staged by Dundee Rep Theatre, Jemima Levick’s version of Tennessee Williams’s iconic name-making play, The Glass Menagerie, must count among the best. I was unprepared for the sensitivity, perfect timing and sheer dramatic artistry of the actors in this four-hander, Read More
Butterflies in November is a sweet, kooky novel. In it, the unnamed narrator, who can translate between Icelandic and “11 other languages” is rejected by her lover, divorced by her husband; she also wins two lotteries, and drives around Iceland’s ring road in November. This is a novel invested in the interplay between reading, living, Read More