Reflections on presence and absence form the emotional core of this moving collection C.D. Rose | Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea | Melville House Publishing: £17.99 Reviewed by Livi Michael At the end of the fourth story in this collection, the main character reflects on ‘echoes and repetitions and endless form most beautiful’, which […]
Monday’s Child & Treske Quartet | The International Anthony Burgess Foundation | Reviewed by Thomas D. Lee
A New Music Double Bill presents innovative and spellbinding contemporary classical music Monday’s Child & Treske Quartet | The International Anthony Burgess Foundation | 15th October 2024Reviewed by Thomas Lee The familiar, cozy redbrick confines of the Anthony Burgess Foundation on a cold evening of October. The thrum of chatter, laughter, polite conversation. Somebody mentions […]
Michael Palin | Winding Wheel Theatre, Chesterfield | Reviewed by Joseph Hunter
Genial, funny, and historic memories from the best-loved Python Michael Palin | Winding Wheel Theatre, Chesterfield | 13th October 2024There and Back: Diaries 1999-2009 (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2024): £30 In 1988 I turned two years old, and Michael Palin travelled around the world in 80 days. I first watched the series several years later with […]
A.C. Bevan | Poundlandia | Reviewed by Andrew McCulloch
‘Selling England by the Pound’: A.C. Bevan finds a way to halt the slide A.C. Bevan | Poundlandia| Mica Press: £10Reviewed by Andrew McCulloch A.C. Bevan has found the perfect title for his well-plotted and immensely readable first collection – a critical, compassionate look at a cut-price world of unconvincing simulations and cheap substitutes, epic […]
Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, To The North, reviewed by Ian Pople
Carl Phillips | Scattered Snows, To The North | Carcanet: £11.99Reviewed by Ian Pople Relatively hot on the heels of Carl Phillips’ Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, And Then the War, comes his new volume, Scattered Snows, To The North. Phillips’ new collection has just been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize in the UK. The volume’s […]
Steph Huang: ‘There is nothing old under the sun’, esea contemporary, reviewed by Joseph Hunter
Fine, industrial-looking sculptures that burn with a cold beauty Steph Huang | There is nothing old under the sun | esea contemporaryReviewed by Joseph Hunter To betray any sense of geographical inferiority is, for a resident of the north of the UK, taboo. Even if you reject the neoliberal, Tory-constructed notion of the Northern Powerhouse, […]
Alan Moore | The Great When: A Long London Novel | Reviewed by Sam Lamplugh
Fantastical, genre-defying psychedelia delivered in exuberant prose Alan Moore | The Great When: A Long London Novel | Bloomsbury: £14Reviewed by Sam Lamplugh What is genre? For Alan Moore, ‘widely regarded as the best and most influential writer in the history of comics’ if dust-jacket biographies are to be believed, the answer to this question […]
The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat) | HOME | Reviewed by Clare Patterson
French New Extremity and Feminist Satire collide in blood-soaked body horror The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat) | HOME | Reviewed by Clare Patterson I’m delighted that Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance is being distributed by MUBI. The chic streaming service, production company and film distributor emerged in the last ten years with slow, thoughtful pictures […]
Apocalyptica plays Metallica Vol.2 | Albert Hall | Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
Strings ablaze in Apocalyptica’s European Tour, ushering new life into the heavy metal anthems of Metallica. APOCALYPTICA plays Metallica Vol. 2 Tour | Albert Hall, Manchester | 29th September 2024Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles On a wet night in Manchester, I found myself in the gothic grandeur of the Albert Hall (a converted Grade 2 […]
Hanna Nordenhök, Caesaria, reviewed by Daniel Pope
The beautiful and grotesque Gothic tale of a young girl’s subjectivity under the medicalizing male gaze Hanna Nordenhök (trans. Saskia Vogel) | Caesaria | Héloïse Press: £10.95Reviewed by Daniel Pope In 19th-century Sweden, Caesaria, the first child born successfully from a c-section performed by Doctor Eldh, is kept in a mansion in the countryside as […]
Romeo and Juliet | Shakespeare North Playhouse | Reviewed by Joseph Hunter
This Diverse Cast Gives Shakespeare’s Love-Tragedy a Vibrant, Funny Retelling Romeo and Juliet | Shakespeare North Playhouse | September 16th – October 5thReviewed by Joseph Hunter A group of extras gather in a waiting room, to be summoned by an impersonal, dystopian PA system when it’s time for them to deliver a single line to […]
Los Campesinos! | New Century Hall | Reviewed by Sam Lamplugh
Los Campesinos! demonstrate their cross-generational, sing-able indie appeal Los Campesinos! supported by ME REX | New Century Hall, Manchester | 22nd September 2024Reviewed by Sam Lamplugh Millennials and Gen Z don’t get on, apparently. Or so I’m told, to co-opt a lyric from Los Campesinos!, who played their first show in Manchester for seven years […]
Natalia Ginzburg, Family and Borghesia, reviewed by Livi Michael
Natalia Ginzburg | Family and Borghesia | New York Review of Books: £11.99Reviewed by Livi Michael In Family, the first of the two novellas in this volume, the two protagonists are not named for several pages. We are, however, offered lot of information about them, delivered in short, factual declarations. Much has been made of […]
Nicholas Pullen, The Black Hunger, reviewed by Thomas D. Lee
Pullen’s queer gothic horror story weaves carefully between the lines of history Nicholas Pullen | The Black Hunger | Orbit: £9.99Reviewed by Thomas D. Lee Earlier this year I was privileged enough to be sent a digital proof of Nicholas Pullen’s phenomenal debut The Black Hunger, a dark delight of a book in which the […]
Much Ado About Nothing | Shakespeare’s Globe | Reviewed by Paul Knowles and Sam Cassells
Comic barbs fly between Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Globe’s contemporary version of Much Ado About Nothing, which handles the fine line between comedy and tragedy with aplomb. Much Ado About Nothing | Shakespeare’s Globe | Reviewed by Paul Knowles and Sam Cassells On a blazing day, in mid-August, we found ourselves in the hallowed […]
Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter, Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles and Sam Cassells
Doomed Love, Broken Promises, and the Fatalistic Irish in Barry’s Gritty Western. Kevin Barry | The Heart in Winter | Canongate: £16.99Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles and Sam Cassells From the moment a drunken opium-riddled Tom Rourke stumbles out of a bar in Butte, Montana in 1891 — In The Heart in Winter’s opening pages […]
Joe Devlin: A collection of modified bookmarks, The Portico Library, reviewed by Joseph Hunter
The novel is always dying, never dead. Prophets of doom are readily available. Will Self would have you believe that the ‘analogue brain’ is going extinct. People just don’t read anymore, we hear. Even students who are paying for a reading-and writing-based education don’t read the texts they’re set to read. (Perhaps that last bit […]
Kathryn Tann, Seaglass, reviewed by Joseph Hunter
Kathryn Tann | Seaglass | Calon: £16.99Reviewed by Joseph Hunter Seaglass, the debut essay collection by Kathryn Tan, is best described as part memoir, part nature writing – and there is a great deal of beauty in Tann’s explorations of the crossover between these two things. The collection clearly owes something to the ongoing rise or […]
Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, reviewed by Usma Malik
Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, Tin House: $16.95 Reviewed by Usma Malik Uche Okonkwo, an award-winning short story writer, is a former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar and recipient of: a Steinbeck Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship (Phillips Exeter Academy), and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Set in contemporary Nigeria, Okonkwo’s debut short story collection A […]
Jemma Borg | Wilder | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Jemma Borg | Wilder | Pavillion Poetry: £9.99 In Wilder, Jemma Borg tackles existential pressures with a series of subtle and flexible eco-poetic experiments that display a range of impressive results. The opening poem is devoted to the sharp, spiny ‘Marsh thistle’. In asking ‘What part of a human soul is this thistle?’, the collection […]
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | Seren Books: £9.99 Sorrowful songs flow from Paul Henry’s newest collection, As If To Sing. These are careful, melodious poems that learn to listen for the watery current that carries love and loss together in our everyday lives. The opening sonnet, ‘Tributary’, follows the speaker returning to where […]
David Constantine | Rivers of the Unspoilt World | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
David Constantine | Rivers of The Unspoilt World | Comma Press: £8.99 Salford author David Constantine, the award winning poet (Queen’s Medal for Poetry 2020), short story writer, translator, and editor, returns with his haunting new collection, ‘Rivers of the Unspoilt World. Constantine’s sixth collection of short stories has a laser sharp focus on the importance […]
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | Dahlia Publishing: £10.00 Reshma Ruia’s, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness is a quiet, contemplative short story collection that asks what happens to immigrants’ dreams in the age of globalisation. What is striking about Ruia’s debut short story collection is that all her characters are in a […]
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You | reviewed by Edward Heathman
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You? | Faber & Faber: £16.99 Sally Rooney, Ireland’s most recent literary sensation, certainly knows how to draw readers in with her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Centring around the friendships between the two main characters and their partners, it offers a familiar portrait of millennials as they […]
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | reviewed by Ian Pople
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | W.W.Norton: $26.95. There is a strong, driving sense of personal narrative in the poems in Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. It feels clear that the ‘I’ in the poems is the writer, herself. This is a first person who is almost fiercely committed to the narratives that create the […]
Nicholas Royle | White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nicholas Royle, White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector, Salt Publishing; £9.99 What I anticipated, on hearing about this book, was something similar to Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built, a kind of bildungsroman about the psychology of reading. I was wrong. This unusual volume is more of a literary travelogue for readers, writers, […]
Dorothy Molloy, The Poems of Dorothy Molloy reviewed by David Cooke
The Poems of Dorothy Molloy. Faber & Faber: £10.99. Born in 1942, Dorothy Molloy starting writing poetry relatively late in her life and it is a sad irony that, having been accepted by Faber and Faber, her first collection, Hare Soup, had just been delivered by the printers in the week that she died of […]
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems, reviewed by David Cooke
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Collected Poems. €20.00 (Pb) The Gallery Press. The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, […]
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (£9.99) In her second collection – what the poet refers to as the ‘sister’ to her first, called Slant Light – Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem: ‘Have you looked, Have you looked deeply – the feeling, the feeling is […]
Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis: Interviewed by Sarah Walters and reviewed by Alienor Bombarde
Nina Simone’s Gum, by Warren Ellis Interview by Sarah Walters Organised by David Coates, at Manchester’s Blackwells. Following the publication of his memoir Nina Simone’s Chewing Gumthe Australian musician and member of the rock groups Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis, visited Manchester’s Blackwells. There, he discussed his inspiration, and memories with Sarah […]
Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | reviewed by Ian Pople
Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | Graywolf Press: $16.00 There is a sharp, tangy sense about Eduardo C. Corral’s poems. Sometimes that tang is almost literal; these poems are never shy about talking about the senses at their most acute. But that tangy quality is part of the Corral’s style, too. The poems are often organised in […]
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | Bloodaxe: £10.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic. Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. Ledger is Hirshfield’s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a […]
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | reviewed by Ian Pople
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | Bloodaxe Books: £10.99 The blurb to Carolyn Forché’s first full collection for seventeen years suggests that the poems are ‘meditative’. That’s one way to describe them but it might not be the best. The fact that many of these poems are narratives either in the first person […]
Amy Woolard | Neck of the Woods | reviewed by Ian Pople
Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, Alice James Books, $16.95 There’s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard’s debut collection, Neck of the Woods. A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: ‘All Get Out’, ‘Girl Gets Sick of […]
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | reviewed by Ian Pople
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | Fitzhenry & Whiteside: C$15.00 The writer who takes on the oracular and the vatic is offering themselves up as a hostage to fortune. The subject matter may well take in the various versions of myth that are parts of certain types of education but not part of the education […]