The surrealism of war against Isis
The campaign against Isis was pretty big news for most of 2016. But by the time the final showdown got…
Satirising the global society: Only Americans Burn in Hell, by Jarett Kobek, reviewed
An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This…
Manic creations: Lost Empress: A Protest, by Sergio De La Pava, reviewed
American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava,…
On the run with Martin Luther King’s assassin
This newly translated novel by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina is really two books, spliced together in alternating chapters.…
Sex, violence and anticlimax in 16 (very short) chapters
‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins…
How not to tell a soldier’s story
Attempts by soldiers themselves to describe to us our 21st-century wars have come, so far, in a few recognisable varieties:…
A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?
When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of…
The writer who showed the West there was more to South America than magic realism
Early on in this ‘Biography in Conversations’ we’re told that the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño ‘continued to see himself throughout…
A Jamaican civil war, with cameos from Bob Marley
There are many more than seven killings in this ironically titled novel — in fact very long — that starts…
