Daisy Lafarge’s debut collection Life Without Air shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, is the ferment of a busy mind drawing from Louis Pasteur’s process of fermentation. Like the intersecting cells on the jacket, suggestive of their proximity, seven sections explore the complexity of human and ecological co-dependence, The inaugural poem, ‘Meridian Dream’, sits title-less Read More
Sitting outside in a motorway cafe on a cool August evening after the mizzling rain, Kirsty Gunn and I talked intensely (as we do) about a novel we had difficulties with. Many of our exchanges were underpinned by the question: how does form and genre enable writing to tackle its subject matter successfully? Will Harris’ 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
Carys Davies has been honing her short form craft for many years, with two collections of short stories to her name and a slew of impressive writing credits that include the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize. It should be no surprise then that her Read More
“Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Walter Kempowski’s final novel is encapsulated in these two questions. They sing an existential refrain throughout the entire text, like the chorus of a song. Faced with an uncertain future, Kempowski’s characters try to cling to fragments of the lives they once knew. A fractured, modernist Read More
You know that episode of Friends where Ross is on one of his mildly patronising rants, oblivious to his friends’ disinterest? Yes, I realise that doesn’t narrow it down. It’s this specific one, when he states: “Soon, there will be computers that can carry out the same amount of functions as an actual human brain! Read More
“You don’t think things like this happen in woodsy Maine, off the beaten path? It sounds more like L.A.? In Maine, there may be a path, but it’s never clear […]” In The State We’re In: Maine Stories, we are transported to Maine – the coastal state that writer Ann Beattie recognises has the reputation Read More
Those familiar with Turgenev’s famous novella First Love may immediately expect a love affair of ill-fated, cataclysmic proportions. For those unfamiliar with the reference, the title of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love is cruelly, cleverly deceiving. A love story? Perhaps. But the bitterness and heart-breaking loneliness that plague the pages of this novel breed an unexpectedly Read More
If the purpose of a collection of short stories is to showcase the style and talent of the author, then The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim is an enormous success. All previously published in the New Yorker over the space of fifteen years, these stories offer a delicious coverage of the author’s Read More
Madeleine Thien is not unused to being shortlisted for prizes, or winning them. Her previous work Dogs at the Perimeter was shortlisted for Berlin’s 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Internationaler Literaturpreis. She, as with the narrator of Do Not Say We Have Nothing Marie Jiang, is the daughter of Read More
