“Perry submerges himself in these cultures without judgment and, through his art, communicates and legitimizes alternative forms of cultural capital.”
[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.”
[Fiction] ‘The Fall of the Owl’ — Tim Harding
“The one thing she never felt while she was dreaming, she thought, was suspicion that she was in a dream.”
[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] Luciano Berio and Fragmentary Composition — Jack Sheen
“Music’s ontological status has always been ambiguous due its lack of materiality, in contrast to physical artworks such as paintings, sculptures, and to some extent, films, whose unique, material appearance and existence differentiates them from other artworks and copies.”
[Fiction] ‘The Death of Cleopatra’ — Paul Murgatroyd
“Octavian sat there with winter in his eyes, calculating, controlling the narrative.”
[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] Lost in Chinatown: Confusion, Music, more Confusion — Jacob Cunningham
“Throughout the film, the music continues to mix elements influenced by the classic Hollywood string sound and jazz of the 1930s with movements that evince how Goldsmith pointedly relates his work to the contemporary musical world surrounding him in 1974.”
[Fiction] ‘Dog Thieves’ — Nick Power
“Hibbs had the thing grabbed by the dewlaps and its nose forced skyward.”
[Poetry] — James Mcloughlin
“Nothing soars here /
but flies under the radar, obscured.”
[Fiction] ‘Architecture in Reverse’ — Joe Bedford
“With a final burst of brilliance, the sun falls missile-like to the point where the sky ends and life begins.”
[Poetry] — Elizabeth Gibson
“The eagle, burnished brown,
/ golden, / his beak and the arch /
of his regal neck somehow in tune”
[Essay] On the One-Liner: Badiou, Hölderlin, and the Joke — Josh Mcloughlin
“The one-liner ‘ruptures’ language, disclosing the essentially equivocating character of the condition for the possibility of the joke itself.”
[Fiction] ‘Gone Away Is The Bluebird’ — Chris Veasey
“‘The money first. Please,’ she said.”
[Fiction] ‘Gloaming’ — Nick Power
“The newborn sky outside is quicksilver and vast, threatens to engulf our eyes completely.”
[Review] Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra — Will Moffitt
“Beginning with Rousseau as the archetypal exemplar of ressentiment, Mishra initiates a thrilling 300-page journey spanning four centuries that intertwines tales of German nationalists, Russian revolutionaries, Italian fascists, and a host of other anarchist terrorists.”
[Essay] Caché: Colonial Misappropriation or Postcolonial Masterpiece? — Joseph Barker
“Haneke provides a masterful critique of contemporary postcolonial reality.”
