3:AM Magazine

She’s My Witch, as the title would suggest, depicts Maria’s world inside her coven of sex witches (a particular focus of Home’s on social media recently), their rites and in particular burgeoning hold over Cooper, as depicted by a series of highly-organised tarot cards throughout the book. Home has clearly done his research here, as not only do the cards form the basis under which Maria extends her sexual hold over Martin, but also arrange the book’s chapters until its cruel yet satisfying denouement. Home works in a backstory for Cooper as a skinhead, particularly his involvement in the “hardcore leftist streetfighters” of Red Action and its offshoot Anti Fascist Action (AFA).

Andrew Stevens reviews Stewart Home‘s She’s My Witch.

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So here he is hands on (techne) with the subject (epistêmê) of his book but, as always with Barber, the history he is addressing — that of Eadweard Muybridge’s projectionist tour of Central European cities in 1891, his Chicago Exposition projections of 1893 and the influence of Muybridge on other artist/projectionists — is always excavated in a deep archaeological and genealogical analysis of the peripheral and the forgotten, the people on the reverse page of history, the shadowy, the splinter events that, in the end, underpin and underwrite the Event itself.

Steve Finbow reviews The Projectionists: Eadweard Muybridge and the Future Projections of the Moving Image by Stephen Barber.

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As it happens, Mitchell has an affinity for the strange. His works usually contain dreams, which he does fairly well, he fancies the numinous and the transcendent, and is often at his best as a prose stylist in his most meditative moments — the literary equivalent a hummingbird’s wings beating in slow-motion HD. One would expect then that a novel about music would channel the best of Mitchell’s gifts into a subject he is better poised to write about than most. He’s written about music before, most notably in the Robert Frobisher section of Cloud Atlas (the best of the book), and unlike Egan and Chabon, it’s clear that Mitchell himself either plays music, or has a theoretical knowledge of it. But readers will not find much of this in Utopia Avenue, a novel that commits to the story of a rock band with a kind of docu-literalism, and is often remarkably incurious about the deeper meanings of music and what it is like for people to create it together.

Jared Marcel Pollen reviews Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell.

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One could call Natural History a “philosophical book,” a novel that remains in dialogue, throughout its pages, with the tradition of twentieth century French philosophy, from Badiou to Derrida. The book overflows, as has become Fonseca’s trademark, with multiple stories that direct the reader in different directions, but which slowly begin to trace the contours of a recognizable conceptual phantasmagoria. From Badiou, it seems to adopt his “theory of the event” and the idea of trying to find a truth, even when the final piece of the puzzle permanently eludes us. And from Derrida, it seems to borrow the idea that every event bears the traces of a previous event, traces that work as displaced repetitions, distorted copies of an original that never gets fully actualized.

Enrique D. Zattara reviews Natural History by Carlos Fonseca, translated by Megan McDowell.

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What Solzhenitsyn describes, carefully and in detail, is the hodgepodge of leaders and potential leaders of parties (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, socialists of different stripes, Kadets, Octobrists, and so on), the citizens (of all classes), the military, and the imperial family, and how they have competing interests. The struggle for control occurs largely in the absence of reliable information, and often is interrupted by bulletins filled with conflicting information from several quarters. There is no appetite for a united approach to restore civility. Anyone interested in how power politics is conducted will find Book 2 (and The Red Wheel in its entirety) fascinating, horrible, and depressing.

Jeff Bursey reviews March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Translated by Marian Schwartz.

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Then—a slip. Gravity has made the decision for you. You’re gone. In the air, heavy and falling. The rope snaps tight: a sharp parabola over the protection you placed below. The rock approaches again. There is no warning, and without thinking you raise your legs, brace the impact. Neatly done: no pain, no scratches or shattered ankles.

Alex Diggins reviews Slatehead: The Ascent of Britain’s Slate-Climbing Scene by Peter Goulding.

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Devy’s argument is that this obvious physical control is linked to control of language. According to Devy, there are 1,500 languages in India not classified as languages. In the schooling system children learn English, Hindi and one “official” state language, but the other languages are completely left out of this dynamic. For Devy this is a more subtle form of clipping tongues. It is bad for humanity too, he argues, since languages are linked to cognitive concepts, and the traditional and ecological wisdom in these languages will therefore be lost.

Jessica Sequeira reviews The Question of Silence: A Para-biography by G.N. Devy.

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There is so much to think and feel, as we follow Mathilda from an unpaid role in a national archive (where she steals ignored photographs of ignored black artists and writers from the 1920s), to an acerbically described pseudo-communist cult somewhere in central Europe, as she investigates the black modernist Hermia Druitt, who had moved in the same circles as the Bright Young People (whom she adores). She both pursues a life of pleasure and escape, on one level (via secret societies and substances), and the methodical reinstatement of this obscured black artist.

Christiana Spens reviews Shola von Reinhold‘s LOTE.

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The consequence is a layered reading experience, in which Ernaux seems at times to be addressing herself rather than the reader, if only to draw us deeper, its effect like that of a secret shared or overheard. In this diligent attempt to convey her own truth is evidence also of the author’s acute sensitivity to her own role, for the responsibility that comes with having the power to shape her own narrative, and its implications for women more broadly.

Daniel Baksi reviews A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux.

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Barkham takes a phenomenological approach to his research; he does not observe the children, but unselfconsciously enters in to their imaginative play, hiding from unknown villains in their forts and allowing himself to be piled on when he unwittingly becomes the villain. He pays great attention to the language with which the children make sense of the natural world around them, marvelling when a severely autistic child who struggles to play with the other children declares that leaves under a microscope look like blood vessels or when a young boy tells him that a twig he found on the floor will become a ‘memory stick’ to ‘remember the baby who died in mummy’s tummy.’

Lamorna Ash reviews Wild Child by Patrrick Barkham.

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