Adam Mars-Jones

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 new novel, Caret, was published in 2023. Box Hill is being adapted for cinema as Pillion.

The strange pleasure​ of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover behind one set of values so as to get a better aim on another. Empathy is routinely booby-trapped, while satire can yield little surges of feeling. He can and does create character, but...

Prawns His Sirens: Novel Punctuation

Adam Mars-Jones, 24 October 2024

Rebecca Watson​’s I Will Crash, her second novel, takes as its subject sibling rivalry, though the phrase seems too mild. Brother-sister conflict most often appears (as it does for instance in Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles) in the guise of a fatal closeness, but the struggle between Rosa, the book’s narrator, and her unnamed brother is a radical antagonism – even...

Promoting​ literary fiction can seem like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the...

Like a Club Sandwich: Aztec Anachronisms

Adam Mars-Jones, 23 May 2024

Culture shock​ seems too mild a phrase to describe the arrival of Europeans in South and Central America. In his 1976 maverick classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (its category speculative neurohistory, at a guess), Julian Jaynes proposes that, at the time Pizarro and his men reached them, the Inca didn’t have full mental autonomy but only...

Space Aria: On Samantha Harvey

Adam Mars-Jones, 8 February 2024

To capture​ the world in a day was one of literary modernism’s defining ventures, with Ulysses setting the standard for exhaustiveness. Restricting the action to a single day is a mild piece of formalism, certainly when compared with some self-imposed contortions, but it disrupts standard novelistic workings just the same. Plot can more or less evaporate, replaced by less strident...

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...

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Zero Grazing

John Ryle, 5 November 1992

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...

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Plague Fiction

Charles Nicholl, 23 July 1987

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....

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Ugly Stuff

Ian Hamilton, 15 October 1981

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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