A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2
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... on people she knew from her local pub, so closely that her publisher required a letter of comfort from the man who supplied the model for the novel’s charismatic villain (whom the novel describes, at one point, as ‘ithyphallic’, the word cut, as Hill noticed, from ‘Unicorn’, to the poem’s advantage). Shadow Dance (1966) tells the story of ...

Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

... uniforms, sleep in company dormitories or small single rooms, and eat at restaurants serving the comfort food of their regions. But Phu My’s time as a capitalist garrison town is giving way to a new phase. At the crossroads where an archway marks the entrance to the city’s first industrial zone, the old jumble of workers’ beer shops that used to be ...

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

... many ‘actants’ occupying six invariant positions in any given tale. ‘For a long time now,’ Alex Woloch writes in The One v. the Many, ‘characterisation has been the bête noire of narratology, provoking either cursory dismissal, lingering uncertainty or vociferous argument.’ Continuing poststructuralist and ongoing scientistic trends in literary ...