The mostly young women in Clare Sestanovich’s pithy first collection of short stories are drifting, with “nonspecific” jobs, “mild” preferences, and “vague” creative ambition.
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About two-thirds of the way through her engaging new book, Emma Lewis describes the subtle yet significant distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’.
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Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church.
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It’s strange for an artist to be defined by a single artwork. It is stranger still if that artist works across a range of media, and is also an author, a teacher, a feminist and an activist.
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‘The point is to imagine,’ murmurs Paula, the walleyed protagonist of Maylis de Kerangal’s engaging new novel, Painting Time. She’s talking to Kate, with whom she’s studying the art of trompe-l’œil at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels.
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‘The interesting thing,’ says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, ‘is that when you use a Lalanne desk, bar or chair, you have to change the way you use a desk, bar or chair.’
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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’.
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As museums in England reopen their doors to the public this month, it is fitting that the Hepworth Wakefield—which celebrates its tenth anniversary on 21 May—is doing so with a major exhibition of Barbara Hepworth, an artist for whom physical encounters with art were so vital.
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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.
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Jessie Greengrass’s absorbing debut novel, Sight, began with an unnamed narrator telling us she was pregnant and ended with her giving birth. In her even more absorbing second novel, The High House, we find ourselves once again waiting for waters to break, although in this case it is the waves that rise and roil.
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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.
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It takes confidence to write about something as undramatic as the postal service – a confidence that struts across the page in Vigdis Hjorth’s most recent novel to appear in English.
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In the autumn of 1977, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and his partner, fellow artist Brian Buczak, gave the painter Alice Neel a lift back into New York City from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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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.
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The latest novel by the writer and musician Jenny Hval is a bubbling cauldron of chaos, as surreal and skewed as her debut, Paradise Rot.
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When Rachel Cohen was a child, she tried to etch her future self in her mind. “I hoped, when I grew older, I would be able to somehow come back and revisit this version of myself and tell her what had happened.”
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A woman wheels towards a large blank canvas. In one hand she brandishes a brush, in the other a palette daubed with paint. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her fine silk dress, the lacy white fringe of her chemise curling over the cuffs.
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Zanele Muholi’s black-and-white portraits are as beautiful as they are harrowing.
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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.
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Man Ray was a reluctant photographer. His career behind the camera was cash-driven and he famously claimed that ‘photography is not art’.
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