Reviews on The Review

John Matthias is a kind of mid-Atlantic national treasure; he was born in Ohio, but married a woman from Hacheston, Suffolk and has spent most of his life shuttling between the two areas. And his status is such that celebratory volumes of essays have been published on him in both the UK and USA. But [...]

Lost Memory of Skin conveys the reader out of their comfort zone and into that area that all good fiction aspires to inhabit, full of challenging ideas and questions that brook no easy answers.
In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may not [...]

How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going [...]

Charting the travails of a call-centre salesman suffering under a demented boss, Socrates Adams’ enviable debut takes its place in a line of bleak workplace satires that runs from ‘Bartleby’ through to Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, something like Douglas Coupland but far more surreal and far, far funnier.
The novel begins with Ian, the hapless narrator, [...]

Chad Harbach’s hefty first novel is one of the major stories of this year’s literary scene: nine years in the making, sold for the kind of sum usually reserved for celebrities, and trailing laudatory quotes from luminaries such as Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney. It is then, something of a surprise to discover how dull [...]

Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson is one of Iceland’s most practiced practitioners of short fiction, dedicating himself to the form long after his peers had moved onto writing novels. He too has now moved onto the longer form, but before he did so he published five volumes of short stories of which Twice in a Lifetime was [...]

Mirja Unge’s debut collection of short stories achieved considerable success when it was published in Sweden. The sixteen stories that make up the collection bear striking similarities and preoccupations. Largely written as first-person narratives, they articulate the female adolescent view on life and relationships.
The prose is sharp and abrupt and Unge does away with [...]

There is a breed of Englishman writing today whose work is very easily reviled; much like the ‘cowpat’ school of English composers of the 40s and 50s. In fact, the sound track to their poems is indubitably the andante second movement of Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto. Their writing has little of Finzi’s sometimes overwhelming lushness, [...]

Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow [...]

There is a tension at the heart of Stephanie Bolster’s wonderful new book.  That tension is between the title with its huge inclusiveness and the contents of the book which is often, though not exclusively confined to zoos and their analogues.  Bolster’s new collection is based around a central conceit of the zoo as a [...]