Tom Crewe

Tom Crewe’s first novel, The New Life, won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and is out now in paperback. He is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Letter

Mesmerised

26 June 2025

Tom Crewe writes: Christopher Waldo’s letter would be a great deal more convincing if he had attempted to explain the ‘singular beauty’ of any one of the sentences I quoted in my review. There, I made a detailed case that Vuong’s sentences don’t work, taking full account of his intentions. Simply stating in opposition that these sentences represent ‘originary fracture and eventual reconstitution’...

Something​ very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to...

Letter

Cartomania

17 April 2025

Tom Crewe writes: I certainly did enjoy Paul Frecker’s book, and am sorry to have provoked him to a defence of its copiousness, which is one of its great virtues. When I said there was ‘nothing on’ actors, artists and writers, I didn’t mean that no actor, artist or writer was mentioned, only that they weren’t given significant thematic treatment. Returning to some of the examples Frecker...

‘Carte de visite’ was a misnomer from the beginning. No one, it seems, ever left their photograph, mounted on a card about 4.5 x 2.5 inches in size, as proof that they had paid a call. People were too enthralled by this new technology to treat it so casually, and although cartes were relatively cheap, they were too costly to be sacrificed so blithely. Instead, photos were given to...

Letter

Unmentionables

11 November 2024

It’s a pity there was no space for men’s underpants in Clare Bucknell’s review of the Under/Wear show at the Rijksmuseum (LRB, 21 November). It’s true that they have always been an easier affair, with many men simply tying their undershirt between their legs, but there is still much to be said about the design and materials, the use of buttons, flaps, laces and so on. Over the centuries,...

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