The Hard Crowd, Essays 2000-2020, by Rachel Kushner
Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Gallery of Souls I’ve Known Many years ago, novelist Rachel Kushner worked in a bar called the Blue Lamp in San Francisco. On weekday afternoons,…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Gallery of Souls I’ve Known Many years ago, novelist Rachel Kushner worked in a bar called the Blue Lamp in San Francisco. On weekday afternoons,…
Reviewed by Michael Eaude This is the memoir of a volunteer to the International Brigades, formed to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Jimmy Jump (1916-1990) was a…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter “Who are we? Where do we come from? What is Britain, and what does it mean to be British?” This book opens eerily similarly to Sathnam…
Reviewed by Rob Spence Inevitably, when Anthony Burgess is mentioned, people who have heard of him will associate him with the notorious novel and then film A Clockwork Orange. Often…
Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess “A woman has to fight sometimes. It’s as well ya know how.” Annie Loveridge is a fighting woman, and no mistake. Helpless to protest as…
Review by Hayley Anderton This is the first of the Daunt Books essay collections that I’ve read and I’m mostly impressed. The quality of the individual essays is universally high…
Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic poets as well as collections of…
Reviewed by Annabel Lucy Holland’s impeccably researched novel combines the story of a 19th Century murder ballad, ‘The Two Sisters’ with Dark Ages post-Arthurian history, mixing in a good dose…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar In Lords and Ladies, his Faerie novel, Terry Pratchett quotes an old folk rhyme: My mother said I never shouldPlay with the fairies in the wood…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter “If we don’t confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out who we are or who we…
Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered the mad world of Chester Himes’s Harlem in an old Allison & Busby paperback of The Crazy Kill, the third novel of his Harlem…
Reviewed by Rob Spence Kenneth Price is the co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, and one of the leading experts on the poet, having published widely on his work. This…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Tired of lockdown, hankering to see new places, and in desperate need of some sun: that describes most of us at this point. New in paperback,…
Reviewed by Helen Parry Until Michael Walmer reissued her first novel, A Day to Remember to Forget, I had never heard of Rosalind Brackenbury. She seems to be scandalously obscure…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton This is one of two recent releases from Handheld Press that cover aspects of wartime experience – in this case life in a huge munitions factory…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Who hasn’t thought of poets as semi-mythical, Byron-like figures, with access to otherworldly visions? The truth is, most of the time poetry takes as much drafting…
Reviewed by Annabel Diary of a Film follows a few days in the life of an auteur film director who is in Italy with his two lead actors to promote…
Review by Rob Spence Modernism has always resisted precise definition, and in recent years it has been normal in literary-critical circles to use the plural form in order to emphasise…
Review by Karen Langley The early part of the 20th century was a period when modern art was flourishing. New ways of living were being explored, abstract art forms were…
Reviewed by Harriet It’s probably a common experience among people who read a lot that sometimes two books will overlap in unexpected ways. This has just happened to me. I…
Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess Schizophrenic. The very word is a trigger for aversion, a signal to run away, with its spiky, spluttered consonants and imprisoned vowels, four foreign syllables meaning…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine a teenager who skips school, smokes, drinks and disappears from his girlfriend on a regular basis; a young man adrift whose main interests are vandalizing…
Reviewed by Peter Reason It was on a family skiing holiday that Horatio Clare finally went mad. This was the culmination of a period of high activity and stress, coupled…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Age of Acceleration In 2019, the Unherd website carried an article by Gerard DeGroot, about the Chang’e 4 moon landing. ‘Whenever something big happens in space,…