Jeanette Winterson’s vision of the future of AI is messianic – but unconvincing
In 12 Bytes, the British author has fallen for and colluded with the Big Data hype, and it is hard to trust her.
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Johanna Thomas-Corr
Johanna Thomas-Corr is a contributing writer to the New Statesman.
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Jordan Peterson: Agent of chaos
The infamous Canadian psychologist returns with more lofty self-help sermons. But his quest for order is thwarted by the…
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Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This is the first great internet novel
The oddball American writer’s debut novel is a witty and true depiction of the experience of living online.
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Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual: shame and redemption in postwar Britain
Spufford’s new novel is a quiet, contemplative book about the imagined future lives of children killed in a German…
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Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is an exercise in snark
The debut novel of a celebrated millennial critic is scornful, cold and – even worse – boring.
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Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon: a novelist takes on the painter’s final days
Porter’s tribute to Bacon is a short work, dense with allusions, somewhere between a prose-poem and a play script.
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Ali Smith’s Summer highlights the risks and rewards of this experimental quartet
Perhaps it's best to think of Summer as something other than a novel or, at least, a distinct subgenre…
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Sex Robots & Vegan Meat: when technology seeks to replace biology
Midway through Jenny Kleeman’s entertaining survey of the latest advances in life sciences, I began to worry.
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Catherine Lacey’s Pew is an enigmatic modern morality tale
In this short novel, Lacey takes the idea of the passive protagonist to an extreme.
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