culture

j. taylor bell To read Ender Başkan’s debut poetry collection, Two Hundred Million Musketeers , is to perceive across generations. Purling in streams of braided narrative – 96 pages without a stanza break – it flows with a pointed accessibility. The saying is that...

James Bradley Towards the end of Departure(s) , the now 80-year-old Julian Barnes reminds the reader this “will definitely be my last book – my official departure, my final conversation with you”. It’s a decision precipitated by his discovery, just as the Covid...

Richard King As neologisms go, “enshittification” is not the most efficient specimen. Unlike, say, “nearlywed” or “broligarch”, it is neither wholly self-defining nor reminiscent of some other word to which it is related in meaning. Clearly the term has struck a...

Andy Jackson It’s apt that Pam Brown’s latest book is titled Guess the Experience . There’s a slipperiness to these poems that revels in the allure of the cryptic and the everyday strange. They track the disrupted fluency of urban attention, where in one moment...

James Bradley The late contender for buzziest book of 2025 has to be David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning Flesh (Jonathan Cape, 368pp, $34.99). Following a man from the suburbs of Hungary to the world of the super-wealthy in Britain, its affectless prose and...

Fiona Wright In the introduction to Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts , Margaret Atwood writes that “every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes” and claims that these two beings have “less idea than you’d think” about what the...

Fiona Murphy “I can resist!” Anne Enright declares as she walks through Dublin, trying desperately not to think about the histories impressed upon the most innocuous corners of her city. When this proclamation appears in Enright’s collection of essays –...

Madeleine Gray Novels written in prose poetry are not for everyone. It takes a very devoted reader to commit to a whole book comprising devolving sentences, words spaced out like patterns, dialogue merging with description. There can be beautiful, accessible prose...

Mireille Juchau “Essays are easy. Fiction is hard,” says British writer Zadie Smith in an interview reproduced in Dead and Alive , her fourth essay collection. “Essays are about your opinions,” she replies to a Spanish journalist from El Cultural . “Everyone has...