I have often asked myself and never found an answer Whence kindness and gentleness come, I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself. (“People Met”) Before the carnage of Benn’s early poetry, Michael Hofmann offers an insightful, engaging, funny and enjoyable introduction into Gottfried Benn’s life and extraordinary career. He describes Read More
If the reader seeks hearts and flowers in the sunnily-named Happiness, they are to be found, albeit pumping viscerally or severed in vases. Jack Underwood questions how we experience, understand, appreciate and attempt to capture that sometimes elusive state. In something of a Ying/Yang complement he explores whether happiness is possible without its shadow boxer. Read More
In the endnotes of New York Drawings, Adrian Tomine asserts that he is a cartoonist, “not just an illustrator.” However, it is precisely that tension between those two artistic identities that define Tomine’s work. Indeed, his two most recent publications, New York Drawings and Killing and Dying, emphasise his versatility, demonstrating that, in spite of Read More
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a startlingly vivid and rich narrative recounting the story of Zimbabwean death row inmate Memory, or Mnemosyne. Through meticulously interweaving and patching a gamut of memories together to form a story, Gappah’s debut novel simultaneously evokes feelings of intrigue, pathos, wonder and hope. The early isolation of Memory informs Read More
This is the first novel by Robyn Cadwallader, an Australian Medieval Scholar who has won several prizes and awards for poetry, short stories and reviews. She has also published a non-fiction book, based on her PhD. The novel is set in the thirteenth century, in an English village. In the Middle Ages, an Anchoress was Read More
Christopher Reid is a big tease. The titles of all 73 poems in his latest collection, The Curiosities, begin with the letter “C”. There’s a wide range of subjects covered between The Contents and The Credits but you won’t actually find THAT c-word in amongst “The Calabash”, “The Collarbone”, “The Celibate”, “The Canoodling”, “The Cufflinks” Read More
This is the first novel by Welsh author, Kate Hamer, who previously won the Rhys Davies short story award in 2011. The first thing that strikes is the novel’s title. Any reference to a girl in a red coat evokes the apparition of the child in Nicolas Roeg’s acclaimed film of 1973, ‘Don’t Look Now’, Read More
Hanif Kureishi, a man who counts not only fiction, but also screen and play writing amongst his repertoire, here turns his hand to personal reportage. A Theft reads as a confessional essay of sorts. Kureishi tells us of his own experience of having his savings stolen by his newly employed accountant, Jeff Chandler. Chandler appears Read More
This is the twelfth poetry collection from Pulitzer Prize winner, Paul Muldoon, named by the TLS as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War”. Born in 1951 in Co. Armagh, Muldoon studied at Queens University, but moved to the US in 1980, where he is Howard G B Clark Professor in Read More
The Hotel Oneira is, indisputably, technically brilliant. August Kleinzahler demonstrates exceptional linguistic skill throughout, flitting between dialects and frequently employing words both obscure and invented. “A History of Western Music: Chaper 44 (Bebop)” appears to function purely as an exercise in capturing the rhythms of that genre: A ramp’d up dance call it cha-cha-faux-bocci CHOC-A-LATTA-CHOCK-A-LITA-CHOC-A-TIKKA-LOTTA Read More