[for the Telegraph, 17/7/19]
What if you found the Moon landings dull?
All in books
'robert rauschenberg: an oral history'
[for Frieze, 27/6/19]
Thankfully, he never learned to see the world with acceptable taste. More than once, An Oral History throws up his old line: ‘I always wanted my works to look more like what was going on outside the window.’
julia armfield, 'salt slow'
[for the Telegraph, 14/6/19]
Armfield’s prose has a stupefied ease. It glides along so stylishly, incurious about the blood intermittently spilling across its palms.
jean-baptiste del amo, 'animalia'
[for the Telegraph, 23/4/19]
Del Amo’s prose is steady and calm; it lets your hopes run ahead; you wish the scene would speed up, but that’s not the way life is.
william logan, 'dickinson's nerves, frost's woods'
[for the TLS, 19/2/19]
If you read enough of Logan’s takedowns, you glimpse an eerie Kennedy sparkle; they’re working so hard to seem off the cuff.
on eric griffiths
[for Frieze, 5/2/19]
He was never wrong, only cruel.
daisy johnson, 'everything under'
[for the Telegraph, 29/9/18]
This is an English novel attempting to be ancient and Greek; its intricacy becomes a little stifling as it strains to make more than one kind of sense.
renato cisneros, 'the distance between us'
[for The White Review, 4/9/18]
“My father, the general, would have strung them up. I hung medals around their necks.” It would be easy to say that the son was right. I think it’s a mark of Renato’s bravery, his honesty, that he won’t.
katharine kilalea, 'ok, mr field'
[for the Telegraph, 18/8/18]
When Kilalea began OK, Mr Field, she was trying to map an architectural dream against a human state of mind.
sjón, 'codex 1962'
[for the Telegraph, 28/7/18]
CoDex 1962 is long, and self-indulgence is human.
jesse ball, 'census'
[for the Telegraph, 7/7/18]
Words might confuse things, but confusion, for now, has given Ball’s pair something to share, and through that, a safe place to dwell.
an interview with jacques testard of fitzcarraldo editions
[for Frieze, 6/6/18]
‘Maybe it sounds silly when you describe the different connections,’ Testard says, ‘but the logic of it is mainly in my head’.
david wheatley, 'the president of planet earth'
[for the TLS, 2/6/18]
Word by word, Wheatley brings the texture of a vista or situation into brutal focus.
sophie mackintosh, 'the water cure'
[for the Guardian, 23/5/18]
Mackintosh writes the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: everything is luminous, precise, slow to the point of dread.
diana evans, 'ordinary people'
[for the Telegraph, 20/5/18]
Ordinary People is a novel of being late for the kids’ show, allowing the rice to burn, not saying that thing outright.
mary miller, 'after happy hour' + chris power, 'mothers'
[for the Telegraph, 24/3/18]
Short stories are objects of conspicuous, intensive craft; like younger children, they tend to be compared to the accomplishments of others.
jeremy gavron, 'felix culpa'
[for the Telegraph, 3/3/18]
This is a genre that hangs on blanks and lacunae, the things that people don’t yet know. (If Philip Marlowe could just interview God, Chandler novels would be short.) In that sense, they’re stories of trying to listen: the investigator strains to pick out a clue, match his account to hers, track down a dingy address based on a name half-heard in a bar.
willy vlautin, 'don't skip out on me'
[for the Telegraph, 24/2/18]
Vlautin thinks in B-roll footage: broad sighing vistas of the Nevadan hills, wild horses bathing in the sun, pinyon pine and birch trees and creeks that trickle along. That characters have to live here, punctuating nature with their mess of cause and effect, seems like an imposition.
bill knott, 'i am flying into myself'
[for the TLS, 8/2/18]
Bill Knott was a learned man. Introducing his selected poems, I Am Flying Into Myself, his editor Thomas Lux claims that he “had read all of English and American poetry . . . twice”.
ned beauman, 'madness is better than defeat'
[for the Guardian, 23/8/17]
Madness Is Better than Defeat may be stylish but it’s long, too, and its relentless flamboyance left me a little cold. I felt as though applause was expected at all the best lines, but would have appreciated a bit of unflashy immersion in what the lines collectively make.