“In need of some levity, I ran my finger along the spines on the shelf and, naturally, plucked out Heart of Darkness.”
Category: Literature
[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.”
[Essay] Metaphysical Detectives: Guilt, Grace, and Gaze in the World of Twin Peaks — Cam Scott
“Lynch and Frost are especially masterful where this feeling of estrangement is concerned.”
[Essay] Bacon’s Hysteria, van Gogh’s Shoes: Deleuze and the Problem of Affect — Josh Mcloughlin
“In Bacon’s hysterical painting and Proust’s literature of memory, sensation works to peel apart affects and bodies, unmooring physical entities from emotional resonances, and ensuring that Deleuze’s attempt to grasp an ‘interminable presence’ remains frustrated”
[Review] The Year in Books 2019 — James Mcloughlin
“Coming up on Christmas, the 20-book mark seemed like a doomed dream.”
[Essay] Thought and Judgement in Hannah Arendt and Hamlet — Oliver Deasy
“Following her experience as a journalist at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt’s thinking about thought became more sophisticated as she began to consider the relationship between immoral actions and the activity of thinking.”
[Essay] ‘Becoming-Animal’: Idle Bodies in Marie Darrieussecq and Lucien Freud — Susannah Farrell
“In Darrieussecq and Freud, the possibility of becoming is tied to the in-human and to nothingness, so that idleness and animality, no longer nihilistic, render affirmation.”
[Essay] Unamerican Fictions: All that is Solid Melts into Weird — Louis Armand
“Thor Garcia’s novel is a swan song for an amnesiac America’s ‘innocence regained’, afforded by the supposed victory over the communist USSR; a kind of ‘fear and loathing’ in the age of hyperreality.”
[Essay] American Honey and The American Dream – Will Moffitt
“American Honey recognises the dream for what it is, an epiphanic abstraction that, for better or worse, imbues otherwise vacuous lives with meaning and purpose.”
[Essay] Politics, Ideology and Comedy: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera — Josh Mcloughlin
“Gay’s joke engages the ‘liberating’ and ‘rebellious’ potential of Freud’s theory of humour to present a radically egalitarian politics.”
[Essay] On Affinity — Charles Bliss
“Neither animate nor inanimate, we vitalise these abstract forms like Dr Frankenstein.”
