King Kong Theory is about being rebellious towards a system of oppression without ever considering violence against it a step too far. If anything, it’s necessary. Despentes contextualises the title by saying she’s more King Kong than Kate Moss – a woman who is still a woman outside the framework determined by men, which is of course has sex as a primary factor.
Read MoreThree girls, murdered in their own small Argentinian towns two years apart one from the other, all three cases unsolved. Years later, after the police and the courts and the newspapers, and the towns themselves, have stopped talking about them, Selva Almada begins to look closer at these murders.
Read MoreAn old Eastern European woman living alone in a remote village where people don’t pay any attention to her becomes involved in a murder mystery somehow connected to William Blake’s poetry while at odds with the police, who don’t take her seriously.
Read MoreMarsman’s The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes, translated from the Dutch by Sophie Collins, is a poetry and prose collection on the writer’s experience with cancer. She evokes the writings of Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag and strikes a balance in her own writing between the personal honesty of Lorde and the social considerations of Sontag.
Read MoreA stand-out debut poetry collection by a writer who has built a distinct voice, Tap Out paints a landscape of American life that is vivid in the small, mundane actions of the characters that inhabit it, and overwhelms with its sincerity.
Read MoreBindlestiff presents a post-apocalyptic-looking landscape that has seen the disintegration of the federal system and of the internet, along with the socio-economic structures that held the country together. But this post-apocalyptic image is just that – an image conjured by a script written by @waynex in the process of getting the Hollywood treatment.
Read MoreIn The Governesses, Anne Serre builds an enchanted, magic atmosphere where everything happens in the shadows. She employs language and imagery that bring the fairytale staples back to their dark, sexually-charged roots while at the same time exploring masculinity and gender dynamics through a feminist lens.
Read MoreThe conditions that led to Zweig’s departure from Vienna and eventually Europe all too closely resemble the current climate. The amalgamation of rising xenophobia, Brexit, the rising popularity of the mildly-labelled “alt-right” in France, The Netherlands, Italy, and particularly in Poland and Hungary, would surely inspire the same feeling of despair in Zweig if he were living today.
Read MoreFrom the very first pages, Animalia establishes itself as a text that demands attention and rewards it with visceral prose that doesn’t simply create a world, but becomes part of its very fabric. It’s dense in a way that every page holds its own weight. The action is focused on movements rather than events – the routine is settled early on, and every activity in the characters’ lives is simultaneously mundane and vital.
Read MoreRilke went to Paris in 1902 to write a monograph on acclaimed sculptor Auguste Rodin. This was only the beginning of his love affair with Paris, a city which he would leave and return to again several times between his first visit and his death in Switzerland in 1926. Rilke in Paris is the combination of his own reflections on Paris and the observations of his French translator, Maurice Betz.
Read MoreIn these stories, Jamie Quatro’s blend of intimacy and a sense of faith in the divine is ever-present in the prose and dialogue. But, more than faith, the defining quality of these characters is a sense of devotion – not necessarily to something holy by definition, but to something deeply personal to them.
Read MoreAnyone who picked up The Years last year does not need to be convinced that Happening is a memoir of the highest calibre by an author who writes with such honesty and precision about the most personal of stories. Annie Ernaux offers a glimpse into a difficult and lonely period of her life as “something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
Read MoreAdam Scovell’s debut novel Mothlight is a first-person introspective journey of understanding how a personal identity is informed and shaped by other people. A novel written with the style and sensibility of a literary memoir, it is as much an exercise in self-exploration as it is an exercise in memory.
Read MoreMatteo Righetto’s Soul of the Border is an fascinating mix of adventure and historical fiction that focuses on the life of a tobacco-growing family during the late 19th century in the Veneto region of Italy. The hard farming life of the de Boer family reflects the wider trials which the working class of the region faced in order to survive during that period.
Read MoreDan Fox’s new book came as a result of writer’s block, a period marked by failed attempts to write a collection of travel essays. Instead, he focused on this phenomenon of creative stagnancy and wrote about his introspective analysis. The result is Limbo, a long essay that considers a multitude of domains, physical and metaphysical, in which agency is removed and time takes on unfathomable qualities.
Read MoreAfter the success of Man Booker International Prize Winner Flights, Fitzcarraldo Editions return with a new Olga Tokarczuk novel. Originally published in Poland in 2009, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead was translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Far from the “constellation-novel” form of Flights that Tokarczuk opts for in many of her later works, it presents itself as a reinvention of the gothic noir and crime novel.
Read MoreAfter having published carefully researched and masterfully written books on drinking, writing, and loneliness, Olivia Laing put out Crudo last week. A fictional story set in a very non-fictional moment in time, Crudo is in essence an attempt to capture, and make sense of, the experience of living through the summer of 2017, and going through that experience one moment at a time.
Read MoreAfter having graduated in art history from Columbia and quitting her job at a pretentious art gallery, the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation retires in her Upper East Side apartment and resolves to sleep for the coming year, at the end of which she expects to emerge a different person.
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