In a disappearing town in regional Australia I sit reading a newspaper. I sit on an uneven metal chair at an uneven metal table at the front of the town’s only bakery. A hot wind blows off the dry plains surrounding the town and I fight to fold my unruly newspaper down to a manageable size.
Julian R Murphy reviews The Town by Shaun Prescott.
Perfidious Albion, the second novel from Sam Byers, is hysterical fiction for this truly hysterical age—where the exhaustion and overworking of the conventions of realism now form a key part of realism’s very definition. The novel is set in the fictional town of Edmundsbury, notable only for the fact that it is not London, amidst a post-Brexit climate that looks a lot like the pre-Brexit one. Far-right populist parties are a key part of mainstream cultural discourse, further-right skinheads are a visible presence on the streets, and large corporations spread their insidious tentacles into the very fabric of society, willing to strangle any would-be resisters still naïve enough to think the hatchet of personal protest will be enough to ward off the suckers. Edmundsbury might be an imaginary setting within a speculative future, but you would be hard pressed to realise it.
Jon Doyle reviews by Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers.
What the reader expects is hardly the point, and Hopper knows it. She presents the book without apology; even in her “this is memory, not perfection, and names may be changed” disclaimer, she makes a joke about drugs. And good for her. Although the book is meant to be taken seriously (as all good writing ought to be, no matter its provenance or subject matter), nothing in it is solemn. It depicts fun without frippery: a number of years of a life spent in pursuit of good experiences.
Katharine Coldiron reviews Night Moves by Jessica Hopper.
New Poets of Native Nations is an ambitious project designed to bring together voices of poets who published their first book in the twenty-first century. As editor, Erdrich makes clear the intention to showcase work that confronts contemporary society. In her introduction, she states, “my criterion that a poet have a clear connection to a Native nation has nothing to do with blood quantum,” eschewing the legal metric by which the US federal government determines Native nation citizenship. Rather, most of the contributors to the anthology are “multiracial” and that “not one of them identifies as ‘Native American’ alone.” This fact makes the anthology a unique primary source for understanding the complexities, and beauty, of hybrid identity and culture.
Gabriel Boudali reviews New Poets of Native Nations edited by Heid E. Erdrich.
The first time I saw First Reformed in theaters, there were gasps, snickers, murmurs of approval, and a couple what the fucks as the credits rolled. I heard plenty more the second time I watched the film, and the third, and something tells me those are exactly the reactions Schrader had hoped for. I doubt I was the only one in the theater who’d come back, but the more I scrutinized the final scene, the more I tried to study it from different vantage points, the more it stayed the same.
Jackson Arn reviews First Reformed from director Paul Schrader.
There is no true storyline or arc he can find in the mess scattered around him, and Bracher structures the novel in similar fashion, without clear scenes, sections, or guideposts: “Fragments of life in no particular order, awaiting imagination, or a need, or whatever might sew them together.” The novel’s form is pragmatic, intriguing in its difficulty, because Bracher’s aim is to reveal a person, not a plot. By the end the pieces seemed to be arranged with great sophistication. Gustavo was realistically vague, broken, loyal, angry, disappointing, brilliant, and unknowable.
The system of anecdotes and interruptions, polyphony of voices and interjections from people who aren’t identified until several pages later, wind around the central core of Gustavo’s guilt about Armando’s death, all of which Morris handles superbly in English. “Bracher knows how to make you love and hate someone simultaneously,” the critic wrote for her review in the far-away newspaper, and wasn’t surprised when it was used as a pull-quote.
Matt Jakubowski experimentally reviews I Didn’t Talk by Beatriz Bracher.
Kharms’ plays would be reminiscent of koans if his characters were at all laconic. For all the nonsense they speak, they have a real exuberance for throwing words at one another. Of a man in a coffin, “green with death”, it’s said that “to seem alive, he talks all the time.” Specifically, he talks about how to make soup: “When the water boils throw a carrot into the water…No you must put a carriage in the water. Although that’s not exactly true.”
Kris Bartkus reviews A Failed Performance by Daniil Kharms.
Sometimes there’s a cautious suggestion that one of the characters may have laughed, but any actual joke remains firmly off stage. Of Marianne’s best friend Peggy we are told, ‘there’s no limit to what can her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine.’ This is rather like a Rooney novel: deftly constructed, impressively immersive but slightly chilling in the serious monotone of its emotional register.
Imogen Woodberry on Sally Rooney
L’s propensity to deal in subject matter that is difficult to parse is not limited to science and hard mathematics. The collection is repeatedly concerned with religion and theology. Smith’s approach to religion finds a way of skirting the all-to-easy pitfalls of naiveté and cynicism. Her stories thread these by approaching religion with extreme interest and no commitments. By rejecting any sort of orthodoxy or dogmatism, she is able to pull from Christian tradition, Biblical literature, and speculative theological thought in a way that employs religion as yet another narrative tool. The plethora of religious themes also lends her writing an intuitive moral center. The subverted Christian vocabulary and imagery adds a weightiness to her stories.
Stephen Mortland reviews L by Theresa Smith.
As a multi-platform literary narrative, Beckett is a successful prototype for a hybrid literary/graphic form that has substantial artistic potential in its combination of text, image, film, found objects, movement and music. Its pared-down style leaves the user’s imagination as free as when reading a work of literature. It is fragmented in that it’s constructed from cut-ups and found objects. It’s a collage. It works as a piece of Dadaist art. Beckett, the game, doesn’t compromise by aiming for some kind of “digital realism” or filmic virtuality. It is literary and visual. It has more in common with George Braque and Cubism than with a narrative driven comic book.
Des Barry reviews the Beckett game.
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