Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond is earthy and dark – and very hard to write about
Like Lydia Davis, Bennett uses a solitary, highly educated female narrator who contemplates chores with a literary-linguistic cast of…
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Anthony Cummins
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David Vann’s unhappy families return in Aquarium
A refinement of his earlier work, Vann's new novel gives a socially determined take on how things fall apart.
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Gwendoline Riley’s First Love is uncomfortable, but impossible to turn away from
Riley once described her writing as “picking at scabs and lying awake”. In this, her fifth novel, the visceral…
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Is Sebastian Barry suffering from mid-career doubt?
An exciting new guard of Irish writers have set the literary world ablaze. But where does that leave the…
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Dark abracadabra: the supernatural adolescents of Daisy Johnson’s Fen
Johnson's new collection of stories mixes the occult and banal to place young women at the centre of the…
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What the short stories of Helen Simpson and Ali Smith say about social equality
Both writers were benificiaries of the post-war consensus. Now, Cockfosters and Public Library both make the case - in different ways -…
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Selfish giants: F is Daniel Kehmann’s most technically accomplished novel yet
The latest translation from the German author is an introspective, postmodern comedy.
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