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.
It’s not entirely clear which of Teju Cole’s books, Open City or Every Day Is for the Thief, has seniority. Open City made a strong impression when it appeared in 2011, and now Every Day Is for the Thief has arrived in consolidation, though it first appeared in Nigeria in 2007. Neither book offers much of the structure or imaginative texture of fiction, with Open City...
If Beryl Bainbridge had published, as her last novel, a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, she might have managed to weather the accusations of pique. Better yet if she had held it back for posthumous publication, to show that she could wait out her own ego. Anyone else is likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the...
In her approach to story-writing Lydia Davis might almost have taken a vow of chastity, of the aesthetic sort publicised by the Dogme 95 group of filmmakers. Dogme principles included shooting on location, recording the soundtrack at the same time as the images (so as to exclude music other than what the characters could hear), using natural sources of light and a hand-held camera....
If there’s a spectrum of Celtic moods then my father tended towards its capricious end. Though he saw himself as rock-solid in the consistency of his principles, you could never quite tell how he would react to anything. The mixture of gravitas and unpredictability made him a remarkable judge, but it was less of a winning formula in the domestic setting of kitchen or sitting room. This was something I had to try to anticipate when I realised, in the late 1970s, that I would have to break the news to Dad that I belonged to the category he hated and feared.
Lisa Dwan has been performing Samuel Beckett’s immensely demanding Not I since 2005. What audiences saw at two short London runs this year, at the Royal Court in January and the Duchess Theatre in February (the production now tours), differed markedly from the published text, though this is not a body of work where experimentation is welcomed. A literary estate is more like a guard...
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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