[for the CHR, 7/6/17]

To listen to Greif’s proliferating ‘I’, turning and turning upon itself, is to receive the impression of a performance not of the self, but for it: an eerily sterile puppet-show, where the essayist can balance ‘I feel something’ with ‘or I don’t feel something’ while the world is screaming and burning on the screen before him.

[for minor literature[s], 10/4/17]

Unfolding slowly and disdaining its notional plot, The Combinations comes to read like a distended roundelay. This is the novel as both dance and farce. Sixty-four chapters, plus an overture, and an intermission, and a coda – each ‘an image from a film, but you can’t remember which one’.

[for the Guardian, 1/4/17]

“What’s a sentence, really, if not time spent alone?” The kind of storyteller who says this won’t take an audience for granted; their phrase, in the pun on “sentence”, weaves expression and imprisonment into each other.