Category: Book reviews

In the last three years we’ve witnessed books emerge from the pandemic, their writers grappling with a unique universal experience through language and literature. Zadie Smith’s Intimations is a slim but immediate account of the early days of the pandemic and of a life altered by lockdown, while Deborah Levy’s most recent novel August Blue sees the…

Jen Sookfong Lee and I had a crush on the same type of boy growing up. The creative, sensitive, poetry-reading boy who was perfectly captured in the Dead Poets Society. While it seems like a harmless crush, one sparked by fictional characters, it forms a ‘type’ that is often non-existent. From my own experience, this…

“Words pressed themselves into her memory, like a shoe sole into soft mud, which would dry and solidify, the shoe print preserved for ever. Sometimes she felt filled up, overstuffed with words, faces, names, voices, dialogues, her head throbbing with pain, and she would be set off-balance by the weight of what she carried, stumbling…

“After a while, being ambitious means having to sift out the few values we feel like keeping and toss the rest, or twist them to suit ourselves. Even the tiny handful of values that remain just get stuffed into the attic of memory, like some old thing bought and used up long ago. What are…

“Translating means understanding, above all, how words slip and slide into each other, how they overlap, how they end up producing a fertile lexical promiscuity.” from Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Lingua / Language,” Translating Myself and Others Reading the ten essays compiled in Translating Myself and Others is like diving into a body of water, one that has…

“‘You two are in something. I don’t know what it is, but you guys are in something. Some people call it a relationship, some call it friendship, some call it love, but you two, you two are in something.’ You gazed at each other then with the same open-eyed wonder that keeps startling you at…

“Let us begin with two girls at a dance. They are at the edge of the room. One sits on a chair, opening and shutting a dance-card with gloved fingers. The other stands beside her, watching the dance unfold: the circling couples, the clasped hands, the drumming shoes, the whirling skirts, the bounce of the…

“Every day she felt unnerved by how unreasonable her love and her fury, which had become one, seemed. She spent most days feeling stunned, aware only of a sort of rage swirling loose inside her like a rainstorm gathering speed, and it frightened her to think of what might happen if she were to let…

“Each class took turns buying the week’s flowers for morning assembly. […] My class’s turn, that first term, came on a frosty morning in December. I had to get up at dawn, before anyone else was awake, and find my way alone to King’s Cross, where I changed to the Piccadilly Line and on to…

“One memory in particular has preoccupied me all morning – or rather, a fragment of a memory, a moment that has for some reason remained with me vividly through the years. It is a recollection of standing alone in the back corridor before the closed door of Miss Kenton’s parlour; I was not actually facing…