“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.”
Category: Literature
[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.”
[Essay] ‘In early August among the spruce’: Reading Schuyler’s Memoirs on Great Spruce Head Island — Jane Hertenstein
“Every day on Great Spruce Head Island was like waking up inside a Porter painting; around every corner and curve was an image from Fairfield’s raisonné or Schuyler’s poems.”
[Review] The Historians by Eavan Boland — Nicholas Taylor-Collins
“History betrays, dissimulates, and occludes; a counter-history is required that maintains the openness of wounds and the liveliness of memory.”
[Essay] Describing the Surface: David Foster Wallace and Postcritical Reading — Nathan Moreau
“David Foster Wallace fucked his students, fucked his audience, fucked his reader. David Foster Wallace abused women.”
[Review] The Brown Anthology edited by Sofia Amina — Daunish Negargar
“This anthology is refreshing in its boldness and authenticity, particularly at a time when major publishing houses are tripping over themselves to make promises on Twitter to ‘do better’ in highlighting more authors of colour.”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
New Critique 