When she first starts working as a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Bianca Bosker is so bored that she prays someone will touch the art.
Read More
The middle story in this compassionate collection follows disparate folk loosely linked by a set of steps.
Read More
Lauren Elkin begins her book about bodily art with a charming ode to the punctuation mark that she in American English calls a ‘slash’ and we in British English call a ‘stroke’.
Read More
Laura Cumming writes about art with a painter’s precision.
Read More
‘Most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately,’ Joni Mitchell once said, ‘and they are men.’ The singer-songwriter was able to detach the maker from the made. Should we do the same? Is it ethical? Moral? Even possible?
Read More
‘I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be any different from other kinds of love. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to stop loving each other? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to break up?’
Read More
Tony Tetro’s memoir starts with a bang – or, rather, a bust.
Read More
It is our ability to see a single thing in various ways that Lily Le Brun celebrates in Looking to Sea: Britain Through the Eyes of its Artists.
Read More
When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising until it spills over the lip and onto the stove.
Read More
There’s still some way to go until the gender imbalance is totally redressed, but The Story of Art Without Men, which describes how women achieved artistic excellence against colossal odds, has firmly cracked open the canon.
Read More
Cressida Connolly’s new novel begins with a couple of endings.
Read More
Emilie Pine writes about the big things and the little things: friendship, love, fertility, grief; waking, showering, catching the bus.
Read More
How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady reads reviews, she tends to ‘scan the first five or six lines, skip to the last two or three, and end up thinking, what’s with these people?’
Read More
Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender to funny to cynical to sinister — the beat goes on uninterrupted.
Read More
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church.
Read More
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and the car engines, ‘exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani’ and beneath the smell of jasmine ‘the stale, slightly medieval smell of drains’.
Read More
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and began writing in Italian. Her new novel — a slim and bewitching tale of a woman at her midpoint — she wrote first in Italian and has since translated.
Read More
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Ground in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in Newford, Surrey, where 13-year-old Stanley Gower meets 16-year-old Charlie Wells, and the threads that bind the boys despite their differences.
Read More
Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future.
Read More
The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey.
Read More