Everybody: A Book About Freedom by olivia laing
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Olivia Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013,…
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
Reviewed by Marina Sofia There are some who crave solitude, others who fear it. There are those who crave some idealized version of solitude, à la Thoreau, absorbing the lessons…
The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing
By Max Dunbar A decade or so into his career as a bestselling novelist, horror writer Stephen King ran into problems. He was drinking constantly and taking cocaine, banging out…
All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District by Esther Rutter
Review by Simon Thomas In the past decade, a trend has developed where the lines between biography and autobiography, between non-fiction and memoir, have collapsed in on themselves. The author…
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming
Review by Annabel The New Year always brings with it a slew of self-help books about becoming the better/fitter/healthier/wealthier you. I look at these books and think – really? Why…
Mind and Body, Medicine, Psychology
Alter, Adam – Irresistible: Why we Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching (Mar-17) LD Benjamin, Marina – The Middlepause: On turning 50 (Aug-16) VB Bond, Michael – Wayfinding (June-20) TJ Byron,…
Books about Books, Lit Crit, Publishing, Reading & Writing
Aldridge, Mark – Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the world (Dec-20) ESL Ansell, Neil – Article: The Art of Memoir and Narrative Non-Fiction (Jan-15) Archer, Jodie & Jocker, Mark L…
The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills
Reviewed by Harriet Sam Mills’ ‘memoir of madness, love, and being a carer’ starts on a Friday night in early 2016. Sam’s father has been locked in a bathroom for two…
Some Questions for Lucy Caldwell
Asked by HarrietLucy, people always like to know how a writer got started. So can you tell us about your beginnings, and when you realised you were going to be…
Q&A with Peter May
Interview by Harriet H: Runaway is quite a different kind of book from your most recent novels, being both less dark (or perhaps dark in a different way) and not set on…
Runaway by Peter May
Reviewed by Harriet I left a note for my folks on my pillow. I can’t remember now exactly what it was I wrote. Something stupid, about going in search of…
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Perfect Tenn: A Life of Tennessee Williams An inconvenience of biography is that before the interesting stuff is revealed, one first has to wade through chapter…