Of the handful of novels I managed to read this year, three in particular stand out. Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue (Melville House, 2016; translated by Elisabeth Jaquette) is the subtle, frequently unnerving… Continue reading
James Wood How Fiction Works James Wood has been on my radar for some time, but it was only this autumn that I came across his delightful How Fiction Works (Jonathan Cape, 2008).… Continue reading
Kenneth Burke A Grammar of Motives Burke is a star on the wane, if being included in the first edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism but dropped from the second is… Continue reading
Fani Papageorgiou The Purloined Letter This collection, Papageorgiou’s third, has two long-ish sequences bookended by a handful of shorter poems. The sequences are comprised of short non-linear numbered poems, which speak to each… Continue reading
Jonathan Tulloch Larkinland (Seren, 2017) “Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook / Behind the door, no room for books or bags — / ‘I’ll take it…” This is how, in “Mr. Bleaney,” Philip Larkin… Continue reading
Since the birth of my daughter two years ago, my reading time has diminished dramatically. I had to become very selective in what I read, which is probably a good thing, considering the… Continue reading
Luck is the Hook by Imtiaz Dharker (Bloodaxe, 2018) is my stand-out book of poetry this year. Lyrical with a compassionate humanity, Dharker’s poems have a piercing, deceptive simplicity of image and language, particularly… Continue reading
2018 was the year I started to read obsessively, hungrily, like a child again. Maybe this was because the internet was giving me nausea; maybe because I turned towards authors whose work not… Continue reading
Deborah Levy Things I don’t want to know (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Cost of Living (Penguin, 2018). The best reading experiences are journeys; books that move you from one place to another, their… Continue reading
Lena Andersson Acts of Infidelity (translated into English by Saskia Vogel) Just like Andersson’s previous book, Wilful Disregard, this is a story about unrequited love – but not as you know it. Acts of Infidelity can be… Continue reading
