Toy theatres reproduced specific productions, but the early ones required considerable imagination on the part of the purchaser. They offered an unadapted play text, a selection of scenes and some, but...
Like all Claire Keegan’s books, it slips down easily, weaving a character’s idiom – ‘he could not say which he rathered’ – in and out of the narrative. It doesn’t argue, it pulses: with observation,...
The most bizarre aspect of the ‘quotation’ as we now understand it is that words uttered by King Lear when he’s mad are ascribed to Shakespeare, and that words attributed with some irony to a character...
Yoga, whose New Agey message wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970s, is about the struggle to accept the fact that you can’t mute your ego, either in the interest of peace and love, or in the...
ex-lover 1ex-lover 21 you smell damp, is it raining?2 nice and dry in here1 two hundred seats not even half full2 Japanese film week?1 funny how Americans dislike subtitles2 you said this...
The stories in Colin Barrett’s first book, Young Skins (2013), assembled a shabby cast of bouncers and pool sharks, small-time gangsters and big-time losers from a dismal Irish town. The...
Returning home from evening massin the big car,they were like canal boats thensliding through the loose gravel, in the back seatshe pushed my cuticles upwith a silver file not unpainfullyto expose...
Novels are put together out of all kinds of raw material; they don’t really have the purity of the older genres. Rather than thinking in terms of linear narrative, we might do better to imagine a pile...
It was going to be a roof-raising, hello God hoedown, a complete riot of personal faith, the sentences glinting with rhinestones and Southern Gothic, all of it secured by a narrative raised on sweet tea...
To belong to the city in this way is to anonymise oneself and slip out of the constraints of gender. Lisa Robertson has always been interested ‘in whatever mobilises and rescues the body’, including...
Jules Renard was a brilliant noticer of things. Distinguishing quirks and concrete observations usually take precedence over broader typologies. ‘The man of science generalises,’ he wrote, ‘the artist...
Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a...
Age: 22. Time: after 2. RumblingOn western skyline, barrage, tangled tracks, trucks,Jeeps, flags, signposts, dust, oily rags, lorries tumblingOver dark crests, pulverised surface almost liquid,...
All novels are experiments, but the thing that separates a thriller (or any other form with its own section in the bookshop) from ‘literature’ is whose constraints carry the most weight: the market’s,...
Shelley’s poetry is full of supernatural phenomena, ‘spirits of the air,/And genii of the evening breeze’. It’s possible to account for them through reference to classical models, but it’s also...
Words, Isidore Isou thought, had done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, he hoped to make space for a new language to emerge....
The romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. It asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary...
Vagabonds! tells compelling stories of survival, about women seizing agency in spite of the forces ranged against them. Men are largely incidental in this brave new world, when they aren’t in the way....