How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady reads reviews, she tends to ‘scan the first five or six lines, skip to the last two or three, and end up thinking, what’s with these people?’
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Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender to funny to cynical to sinister — the beat goes on uninterrupted.
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Light and dark are threaded throughout this spellbinding and sometimes scary exhibition, which focuses on the triumphant final two decades of Louise Bourgeois' long career.
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The first thing you see upon entering ‘Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art’, a striking new exhibition at Two Temple Place, is Ladi Kwali and Kiln, a black-and-white photograph taken in the early 1960s.
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Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts radiate a delicate power. It’s there in the light and airy lavenders and blush pinks, and the deep blues and bottle greens that gleam like beetles.
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The mostly young women in Clare Sestanovich’s pithy first collection of short stories are drifting, with “nonspecific” jobs, “mild” preferences, and “vague” creative ambition.
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About two-thirds of the way through her engaging new book, Emma Lewis describes the subtle yet significant distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’.
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Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church.
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It’s strange for an artist to be defined by a single artwork. It is stranger still if that artist works across a range of media, and is also an author, a teacher, a feminist and an activist.
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‘The point is to imagine,’ murmurs Paula, the walleyed protagonist of Maylis de Kerangal’s engaging new novel, Painting Time. She’s talking to Kate, with whom she’s studying the art of trompe-l’œil at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels.
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‘The interesting thing,’ says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, ‘is that when you use a Lalanne desk, bar or chair, you have to change the way you use a desk, bar or chair.’
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I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and the car engines, ‘exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani’ and beneath the smell of jasmine ‘the stale, slightly medieval smell of drains’.
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As museums in England reopen their doors to the public this month, it is fitting that the Hepworth Wakefield—which celebrates its tenth anniversary on 21 May—is doing so with a major exhibition of Barbara Hepworth, an artist for whom physical encounters with art were so vital.
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After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and began writing in Italian. Her new novel — a slim and bewitching tale of a woman at her midpoint — she wrote first in Italian and has since translated.
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Jessie Greengrass’s absorbing debut novel, Sight, began with an unnamed narrator telling us she was pregnant and ended with her giving birth. In her even more absorbing second novel, The High House, we find ourselves once again waiting for waters to break, although in this case it is the waves that rise and roil.
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Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Ground in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in Newford, Surrey, where 13-year-old Stanley Gower meets 16-year-old Charlie Wells, and the threads that bind the boys despite their differences.
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It takes confidence to write about something as undramatic as the postal service – a confidence that struts across the page in Vigdis Hjorth’s most recent novel to appear in English.
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In the autumn of 1977, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and his partner, fellow artist Brian Buczak, gave the painter Alice Neel a lift back into New York City from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future.
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The latest novel by the writer and musician Jenny Hval is a bubbling cauldron of chaos, as surreal and skewed as her debut, Paradise Rot.
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