To enjoy all the benefits of our website
Leo Robson is the lead fiction reviewer for the New Statesman.
Coetzee’s trilogy of deadpan, present tense, fable-like fantasies, culminates in his extraordinary new novel The Death of Jesus.
Best, if inadequately, described as a biography, this book’s lack of a subtitle or introduction or any clue to intentions is telling: anything may be included or excluded.
With his phrase-making brilliance and omnivorous cultural appetite, the late Clive James taught me how to be a critic.
At the Jerusalem remains a striking example of “imaginative empathy”.
Isabel Waidner on their Goldsmiths-shortlisted novel We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff, marginalised writers, and the Isle of Wight.
In Isabel Waidner’s Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel, Reebok is discussed along with Robert Rauschenberg, commas enable syntactical flow, and genders blur or disappear.
The Cockroach is billed as a modern take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis that doubles as political satire. But as you move through the book, it becomes less clear what it has to do with either Kafka or Brexit.
This is a work full of pills, porn and pseudo-nuance – almost-but-not-quite clever.
Was the most recognisable writer of her generation little more than a high-class intellectual con-artist?
Rushdie’s Booker-nominated Cervantes homage Quichotte is prone to lapses in tact and taste, and a lack of respect for the reader’s time or powers of concentration.
