Reviews on The Review

Jill Bialosky’s first publication in the UK, consists of substantial selections from her three US collections. The first of these, The End of Desire, consists mainly of pitch-perfect narratives of childhood and growing up. Bialosky moves between her own life and those of her mother and her two sisters, and gathers details of the domestic [...]

So the sequence of expanded Cure re-issues has finally reached Disintegration, for many the band’s defining album.  As a long-term fan I never quite saw it that way; my favourite album was, and is, ‘the one no-one else likes’ (The Top).  As time’s gone on, though, ‘the one that first got me into them’ has [...]

I should admit to a certain bias when it comes to seeing The Charlatans, this being my 19th time.  But they were a decade into their career before I caught on, when they made a giant indie disco of the 1999 Leeds Festival, so a whole gig from 1990’s Some Friendly era is still a [...]

There’s something not quite right with Bradford Cox.  Tonight specifically, I mean: what begins with a late start and some fairly surreal musings ends with the sound-tech lining-up receptacles for a threatened up-chuck by the front-man.
The last time I saw Deerhunter make their waves of big noise it was in broad daylight, in the afternoon [...]

         So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . .  he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for [...]

reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
 
Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, gained a doctorate from Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. She has written a book on Emerson, three books on asset management, and five volumes of poetry. This new collection reflects both the breadth of cultural reference and the rather privileged perspective [...]