Category Culture

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Liars by Sarah Manguso audiobook review – livid tale of marriage gone awry

Rebecca Lowman narrates a superb, claustrophobia-inducing plunge into a relationship descending from bad to worse

Halfway through Liars, the story of a new relationship that becomes a marriage, our protagonist, Jane, is asked by a neighbour: “Why are you with him?” It’s a question that has been on the listener’s mind for some time.

Jane’s partner, John, lies about his feelings, his financial status, where he is going and where he has been. He is chaotic, lazy, resentful, entitled and given to getting drunk and spending money he hasn’t got. At the start of their marriage, Jane’s career as a writer and academic is on the up, while John – a visual artist and aspiring film-maker – has hit a professional wall. Time and time again, he insists they move cities for better work opportunities, which soon puts a spanner in his wife’s working life. It comes as no surprise that, after their son is born, Jane is left to do the parenting while her husband absents himself from his responsibilities.

Available via Picador, 6hr 7min

Continue reading...

Jeeves Again review – new Jeeves and Wooster stories by celebrity fans

This collection of new short stories about Bertie and his valet pays homage to the genius of PG Wodehouse – just in time for Christmas

As with most of the giants of late 19th- and early 20th-century English literature, the vast majority of PG Wodehouse’s readers today are non-white. Perhaps it was brutal colonial indoctrination that ensured the modern descendants of the aspirant imperial middle classes from Barbados to Burma, with their tea caddies, gin-stuffed drinks cabinets and yellowing Penguin paperbacks, still devour Maugham, Shaw and Kipling. Perhaps they just have good taste.

Wodehouse’s detractors are many – Stephen Sondheim (“archness … tweeness … flimsiness”), Winston Churchill (“He can live secluded in some place or go to hell as soon as there is a vacant passage”), the Inland Revenue – but for millions around the world he remains the greatest comic writer Britain has ever produced. And he clearly still sells here, as this collection of a dozen new officially sanctioned stories by writers, comedians and celebrity admirers, out in time to be a stocking filler, attests.

Continue reading...

The Dinner Party by Viola van de Sandt review – a formidable debut

An intimate soiree builds to a horrific climax in this visceral novel about a young woman tasked with hosting a meal for her fiance

Literature loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to more recent offerings such as Sarah Gilmartin’s The Dinner Party and Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, an intimate soiree provides the perfect recipe of claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink their teeth. The preparations are usually unduly stressful, the guest list dynamic unpredictable, the quantity of alcohol borderline obscene – in short, as a device it has all the ingredients for total, delicious carnage.

The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose debut The Dinner Party centres on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiance Andrew and his two male colleagues. To make matters more challenging, it is the hottest day of the year, the menu is rabbit (despite Franca’s vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat.

Continue reading...

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco review – a masterclass in visual reportage

The author of Palestine turns his attention to the legacies of Indian partition in this brilliant portrait of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots

Joe Sacco is one of a very small number of graphic novelists who have smashed through into the mainstream. His masterwork is Palestine, a collected volume of single-issue comic books he created in the 1990s, documenting the violence in Gaza. His technique is to embed as a journalist in a war zone and interview people on the street, telling their stories with pictures. Lessons on global politics emerge from ultra-local conflict and depictions of day-to-day life.

Palestine propelled Sacco to fame, drawing comparisons with Maus, Art Spiegelman’s two-volume saga about Polish Jews during the Holocaust with Nazis portrayed as cats, and Jews as mice. These works are sold prominently in bookshops, not in musty basements packed with racks of polyethylene-sheathed superhero comics. Alongside a couple of others, Maus and Palestine signalled that graphic novels, as they became known, could be serious works of fiction, nonfiction and journalism. Palestine itself is as depressingly relevant today as it was in the 1990s. In December 2023, it was reprinted for the first time in a decade, after selling out following the 7 October attacks.

Continue reading...

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn review – a visceral tale of witchcraft

The author of The Employees goes back to 17th-century Denmark for an intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity

On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days. The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”

The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

Continue reading...

Memoirs, myths and Midnight’s Children: Salman Rushdie’s 10 best books – ranked!

As the author publishes a new story collection, we rate the work that made his name – from his dazzling Booker winner to an account of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him

“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become: garrulous, playful, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s messy but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is already here. (Rushdie’s first choice of career was acting, and he honed his skill in snappy lines when working in an advertising agency.) Not a great book, but one that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a fascinating beginning to a stellar career.

Continue reading...

Poem of the week: Now winter nights … by Thomas Campion

A song to the consolations of winter is delivered with the grace and precision typical of this intellectually ambitious poet

Now Winter Nights …

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Now let the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques and courtly sights,
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

Continue reading...

Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu review – life with borderline personality disorder

A student navigates troubled relationships at age 19 and 25, as he comes to terms with mental health difficulties

“The best way to make sense of life,” Derek Owusu believes, “is to write about it.” His semi-autobiographical debut, That Reminds Me, was an attempt to understand how he came to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: a condition marked, among other things, by intense emotions, self-destructive impulses, fear of abandonment, black-and-white thinking, and an unstable sense of self. The novel, written in an elliptical and densely poetic style, offered an illuminating, if harrowing, account of alienation, addiction and self-harm, through the story of K, an alter ego whose early childhood, like Owusu’s, was spent in foster care. It won Owusu the Desmond Elliott prize in 2020, and announced him as an idiosyncratic talent; in 2023, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Owusu now turns again to the subject of BPD, this time exploring the complexities and contradictions of living with the condition. His narrator, Marcus, is 25 when the book opens. An English literature student of Ghanaian heritage, he is at a speed dating event when he meets San. San is strikingly beautiful, and she grabs his attention right away: “So, yes, I was in love again, losing balance, stumbling towards an earlier phase of my life.”

Continue reading...

John Updike: A Life in Letters review – the man incapable of writing a bad sentence

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence

John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.

As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the 20th century.

Continue reading...

Is there a dark side to gratitude?

Feeling thankful is increasingly touted as a cure-all, but sometimes there are reasons not to be grateful

The word “gratitude” is everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, emblazoned on mugs and motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” (usually jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days) brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

I don’t want to seem, well, ungrateful. I’m a sceptical historian, but even I was persuaded to take up the gratitude habit, and when I remember to do it, I feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already in my life. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there’s the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

Continue reading...