Adam Mars-Jones is a professor of creative writing at Goldsmiths. His novels include Box Hill and Batlava Lake, which are quite brief, and Pilcrow and Cedilla, which are intended to be part of a million-word sequence. An early version of some of Kid Gloves: A Voyage round My Father appeared in the LRB. His latest novel, Caret, was published in 2023. Box Hill has been adapted into a film, Pillion, which had its premiere at Cannes.
George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, featured a cast who were mostly dead, though still conversational, and his new novel, Vigil, revisits the device – one that goes back in American literature at least as far as 1915 and Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology. In that book a town’s dead inhabitants...
As Adèle Yon tells it in Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth, when she was eighteen she went to a party, taking with her a bag of weed. A distant cousin who was also at the party made a beeline for her, or for her stash (the two young women hadn’t spoken before). She shared it and left what remained when she went home. Somehow news of this encounter reached her grandparents, giving them...
Gurnaik Johal’s admirable first novel starts with a piece of miraculous regeneration. Satnam, a Londoner, visits Punjab for the first time since childhood to scatter his grandmother’s ashes (this is East Punjab, on the Indian side of the border, predominantly Sikh). He looks down into the old well on the family farm – dry for many decades – and is surprised to see...
At one point in Kiran Desai’s new novel the heroine, Sonia Shah, sets out to write a journalistic sketch of the Indian kebab, ‘massaged, marinated, oiled, spoiled, pampered, pompous, romantic’, but finds the subject expanding relentlessly. She researches the tabak maaz of Kashmir, the Afghani reshmi, the pathar kebab, ‘cooked on a hot stone to absorb the flavour of...
Alan Garner’s new book is a patchwork of memoirs and essays, taking its title from the offcuts of tapestry that weavers (like some of his forebears) would take home with them. His heyday has been a long one. Garner’s first book for children, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, has a place on the shelves and in the memories of generations of readers, while his...
Adam Mars-Jones reads his review of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.
Adam Mars-Jones describes his relationship with his writing, and the origins of Kid Gloves, his acclaimed memoir of his father.
In 1948, Tennessee Williams published a short story (and collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm...
Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s...
It sounds like it’s something to do with helping, but that is very far from its meaning. I can’t remember when we first started hearing it; no more than five or six years ago, surely....
William Trevor is bewitched by childhoods and by second childhoods: the ‘grown-up’ bit in between is for him a dullish swamp of lies, commerce, lust and things like that. For Trevor,...
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