More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed
We have already met versions of Self’s mother in his fiction, but here we have a detailed portrait – of her rages, frustrations, fantasies, panic attacks and – not least – extramarital affairs
Blow your mind
The UK seems on the brink of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’ – but, stripped of shamanic ritual and sanitised for medicinal purposes, will psilocybin retain its power?
Violence in the Valley
When a man with a machete infiltrates a local synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the peace of one the ‘greenest, quietest, safest’ places in America is shattered
The inner world of others
As ever in her short stories, Hadley uses the smallest details – of dress, food and decor – to masterfully convey class, character and the inner world of others
A sister’s quest for justice
Ten women, on average, are killed there every day – and Cristina Rivera Garza’s investigation of her sister’s murder is met with the usual ‘silence of impunity’
How the Muppets went to Moscow as ambassadors for democracy
In 1993, Natasha Lance Rogoff was tasked with introducing the American puppets to Russia in the hope of cultivating peace, love and understanding
Displacement and disturbance: Seven Empty Houses, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed
Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American…
Isolating with the ex: Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed
Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.…
A post-racial world: The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid, reviewed
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
Life’s great dilemma: Either/Or, by Elif Batuman, reviewed
In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif…
Only time will tell if there’ll be a Great Pandemic Novel
We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…
Portrait of a paranoiac: Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…
The dark underbelly of New Orleans revealed by Hurricane Katrina
Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book…
Too plain or too pretty — are we still prejudiced against professional women?
In Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders, the social historian Jane Robinson — whose previous books include histories of suffragettes and bluestockings…
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…
A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same…
Erotic longings that left me cold
The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less…
A very tangled web: Liar, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, reviewed
The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ – see above left (emet) is comprised of the first, middle and last letters of…
