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BAD TASTE Or the politics of ugliness NATHALIE OLAH 240pp. Dialogue. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. NO JUDGEMENT On being critical LAUREN OYLER 288pp. Virago. 20 [pounds sterling]. ALL THINGS ARE TOO [...]

THE ECHOES EVIE WYLD 240pp. Cape. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. On December 27, 2021, the New Yorker published Parul Sehgal's brilliant, definitive essay 'The Case Against the Trauma Plot'. But the [...]

In my review of Colm Toibin's Long Island (May 31), I argued that there's something fatally tasteful about the fictional world of Enniscorthy where Long Island, Brooklyn, The Blackwater Lightship [...]

LONG ISLAND COLM TOIBIN 304pp. Picador. 20 [pounds sterling]. There's something slightly unfair about the way reviewers consume fiction, reading several books by the same author all in one go. [...]

TREMOR TEJU COLE 256pp. Faber. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. In the final essay of her final (posthumous) collection, Still Pictures: On Photography and memory (TLS, February 3, 2023), Janet Malcolm describes [...]

THE FRAUD ZADIE SMITH 464pp. Hamish Hamilton. 20 [pounds sterling]. NO OEUVRE is consistently excellent. Which makes reviewing your literary heroes a dangerous kind of roulette. After the bank-breaking brilliance [...]

THE VASTER WILDS LAUREN GROFF 272pp. Hutchinson Heinemann. 20 [pounds sterling]. The English settlement of Jamestown was established in 1607. Its location on the Virginia coast was chosen for defensive [...]

BE MINE RICHARD FORD 352pp. Bloomsbury. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. Richard Ford's first two Frank Bascombe books were The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995), which won the Pulitzer prize and [...]

I don't think I'M supposed to like this novel. I've had that feeling ever since I suggested it to an all-female book club I briefly belonged to in my early [...]

BIRNAM WOOD ELEANOR CATTON 432pp. Granta. 20 [pounds sterling]. In 2008, Eleanor Catton, then aged twenty-two, published The Rehearsal (TLS, August 7, 2009), a novel about adolescence and teacher-pupil relationships. [...]

I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME LORRIE MOORE 208pp. Faber. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. In Lorrie Moore's collection Birds of America (1998), you can read the justly famous [...]

Like most obituaries, this piece was written --is being written--in advance of its use, in this case in the summer of 2017. The Queen is currently ninety-one. The Duke of [...]

THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS ALEKSANDAR HEMON 352 pp. Picador. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. IN 1987, the writer Aleksandar Hemon was working at a radio station in Sarajevo. He [...]

BOURNVILLE JONATHAN COE 368pp. Viking. 20 [pounds sterling]. Jonathan Coe'S Bournville ('A novel in seven occasions') is fortuitously timed. It is book-ended by two VE Days (1945 and 2020), and [...]

DEMON COPPERHEAD BARBARA KINGSOLVER 560pp. Faber. 20 [pounds sterling]. Top of Barbara Kingsolver's list of writing tips (compiled in 2015 for Writers Write): quit smoking in the hope of growing [...]

John Updike NOVELS 1959-1965 The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm 824pp. Library of America. $45. 978 1 59853 581 5 In the opening scene of Rabbit, [...]

BEST OF FRIENDS KAMILA SHAMSIE 336pp. Bloomsbury. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. Do you read with your ears or your eyes? More specifically, do you 'subvocalize': are you sounding these words out [...]

THE ADVENTURES OF MISS BARBARA PYM PAULA BYRNE 704pp. William Collins. 25 [pounds sterling]. Question: In the TLS's symposium on the most over--and underrated writers of the century, published in [...]

LAPVONA OTTESSA MOSHFEGH 320pp. Cape. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation (TLS, August 17, 2018)--the standout of Ottessa Moshfegh's four novels--a conceptual artist videos the affectless [...]

EITHER/OR ELIF BATUMAN 368pp. Cape. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. Halfway through Vox (1992), Nicholson Baker's great novel about phone sex, the male caller asks the female caller to tell him what [...]

LANGUAGES OF TRUTH Essays 2003-2020 SALMAN RUSHDIE 368pp. Cape. 20 [pounds sterling]. THE LAST ENTRY in Salman Rushdie's Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 is Vanity Fair's parlour game, the 'Proust [...]

PURE COLOUR SHEILA HETI 244pp. Harvill Secker. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. In the crowded big top of autofiction, Sheila Heti is up there on the highest wire, wearing a clown suit, [...]

PEACES HELEN OYEYEMI 272pp. Faber. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. Early in Helen Oyeyemi's new novel Peaces, a character identifies 'four different types of engaged audience' at a marionette show: There are [...]

THE MORNING STAR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD Translated by Martin Aitken 688pp. Harvill Seeker. 20 [pounds sterling]. Karl Ove Knausgaard's magnum opus famously stemmed from a crisis of confidence in the [...]

THE DEATH OF JESUS J. M. COETZEE 208pp. Harvill Seeker. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. THIS IS THE MAGISTRATE, imprisoned in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980): 'I build my [...]

TAKING A LONG LOOK Essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time VIVIAN GORNICK 304pp. Verso. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. In 1920, when Vivian Gornick's mother was eighteen years old, [...]

DOUBLE BLIND EDWARD ST AUBYN 256pp. Harvill Seeker. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. From Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's Meaning of Liff: The original dictionary of things there should be words for [...]

MARY BEARD John Williams's novel Stoner became a must-read rediscovery of 2013. I'm afraid I resisted. But I am intending to sit down this summer with the last of his [...]

Joost Zwagerman, editor THE PENGUIN BOOK OF DUTCH SHORT STORIES Translated by James Brockway, David Colmer et al 592pp. Penguin Modern Classics. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling]. 978 0 14 139572 [...]

BRICK A literary journal Biannual. Cypress Avenue. Can $25 per year; US $26 per year ($30 rest of the world). Parts II and III of Jan Zwicky's four-part essay 'Poetry [...]

Nelly Alard COUPLE MECHANICS Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter 320pp. Other Press. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling] (US $17.50). 978 1 59051 731 4 Martin Kongstad AM I COLD [...]

TIN HOUSE Quarterly. McCormack Communications. $34.95 per annum (Canada $49.95; rest of world $64.95) None of the reviews in Tin House will ever win Hatchet Job of the Year. Each [...]

Paul Ewen FRANCIS PLUG How to be a public author 290pp. Galley Beggar Press. Paperback, 11 [pound sterling]. 978 1 910296 14 7 The small publishing house Galley Beggar Press [...]