“The desert and Bowles’s short stories shimmer, caught in a vortex of pressurized silence, burying identity, form, emitting illusion.”
Category: Literature
[Review] Froyo and Fragility: On Vanessa Roveto’s The Valley (a void) — Kenzy El-Mohandes
“Home and the valley become a frame of mind for Roveto’s characters, more than a specific place […] and while context evaporates, so does sanity, abstracting the scenery until it fades entirely into a hazy backdrop.”
[Essay] The Banshees of Inisherin and the spectre of W.B. Yeats — Nora Doorley
“Little attention has been paid to the influence of W.B. Yeats on The Banshees of Inisherin, and the film’s recycling of uniquely Yeatsian themes and symbols.”
[Review] Shannon Harris’s Exvangelical Reckoning and the Slow Excavation of the Self — McKenzie Watson-Fore
“For nearly two decades, Harris lived as a mannequin on display in conservative Christianity’s window. She was advertised to evangelical girls like me as the ideal”
[Review] The Year in Books 2022 — James McLoughlin
“I realised this year that, for all that literature can be a great escape from the drudgery and occasional trauma of life, it’s easy to get swept up in the drama of the everyday and forget the balm that great fiction can bring.”
[Essay] After “Life and Fate” — Margo Berdeshevsky
“I rock inside, a child again. Daughter of a man born in Ukraine who always said he was Russian.”
[Essay] A Historical Fiction — Stephanie Limb
“I feel a pleasure similar to Lisa Robertson’s when I read historical fiction. Maybe Cusk is right. Maybe it is pornography; maybe that’s why I like it.”
[Essay] The ‘everlastinge Posterytie’ of Thomas Chatterton: George Rawlins’s ‘Cheapside Afterlife’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Rawlins’s powerful sonnet sequence of ‘imagined history’ is a fitting tribute to Chatterton’s forged fictions.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2021 – James McLoughlin
“As always, reading gives us the chance to escape, to imagine different worlds with exciting possibilities. Or sometimes it simply reflects the extant world back at us from an angle we have never seen ourselves. Either way, when you spend 99% of your time within the same four walls, reading is simply a way to avoid going postal.”
[Review] Of Sea by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett — Connor Harrison
“This is not nature as allegory, but nature as observed. Burnett is writing of the millipede and the ragworm as a historian; out of frame but entirely in control of the scene.”
[Essay] Breaking Urns: From Ingmar Bergman to Yo La Tengo — John Talbird
“The atrocities of World War II and then all the post-war proxy-wars, most especially Vietnam, ossified and then shattered narrative wholes, all those well-wrought urns.”
[Essay] My Own Personal Jesus — Connor Harrison
“There is perhaps nothing in the Louvre as widely depicted as Jesus and his life. He dogs you down every hall and corridor, fabricated by so many hundreds of dead hands.”
[Review] Slaughter by Rosanna Hildyard — Daunish Negargar
“Hildyard brings a nuanced perspective to both the realities of farming in the United Kingdom and female sexuality, as contradictions are not skimmed over, or resolved, but rather relished and dissected like a bloody carcass throughout this dark tale”
[Essay] Distance — Connor Harrison
“Here in form if not in content, is my father in his broken epilogue – sentences, offered from across the border”
[Review] 06C33 by Sofia Amina — Josh Mcloughlin
“The weight of ancestry and history press down on Amina’s reflections as she carries, quarries, and questions the burden of cultural inheritance: ‘Where does my history begin?’”
[Review] The Year in Books 2020 — James McLoughlin
“In need of some levity, I ran my finger along the spines on the shelf and, naturally, plucked out Heart of Darkness.”
[Essay] Dickens’s Spirits — James Riding
“These ghosts keep returning in Dickens’s writing not just because of their practical uses, but also out of necessity: they are an intrinsic component of his craft. Dickens knew all too well that a writer must be a bodysnatcher.”
[Essay] To You — Christopher Impiglia
“A long time, one hundred years. A long time too since this first English edition, bought by my father at auction, was published: a half-century. Fifty years of annotations illuminating it, including his and my own.”
New Critique 