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The obvious thing would be to create a Spotify playlist, but I’m not a basic bitch. I wasn’t writing This Brutal House with one particular track in mind, more a mash-up of the street styles of that era: rare groove, electro, hip hop and Chicago. I hope something in these tunes will allow the book to resonate even more strongly; for while This Brutal House is a story of protest, chosen family, silence and redemption, its fierceness should be undeniable. Turn these up and flex.
Niven Govinden on the music that influenced his brilliant new novel, This Brutal House, out on June 6th.
I would spend hours trying to perfect the handwritten cursive Cyrillic. My name ‘Ellie’ was transformed into a word with loops, curves and embellishments; calligraphy that was euphemistic of everything I aspired to be. Is your handwriting style a psychological self-portrait? I felt I had a second chance. Cyrillic enabled me to manipulate my self-image, in a way that could be true to ideals I desired, with a focus on a new vision of beauty. And so, in the madness and confusion of my school life, I could finally see my own worth on paper in front of me, in my transformed Cyrillic and Russified name.
By Ellie Holbrook.
Animalia is not just about barbarism. It is also about time. Smells become a vector of historical change. When Marcel returns from the war, with a sewn-up eye socket and ruined impression of a face, his experience is contained within his smell: ‘The smell of straw, of animals and sweat has given way to that of alcohol and ether, of morphine and oil of camphor, of stale tobacco and hooch.’ This game of olfactory compare and contrast can be most profitably played between the book’s two halves, when the peasant farmland of 1914 gives way to the intensive mechanized operation of 1981. Before, the fields ‘smell of hay, wild garlic, broom and warm stones’; now, the brothers breathe ‘shallow gulps of ammoniacal emanations’ and ‘the acrid stench of Cresyl [a disinfectant] and slurry’.
Daniel Marc Janes reviews Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo.
The novel begins and ends with a hiccup. The first of a whole patchwork of intertextual winks and nods; Hodgson invites us to draw comparisons with Proust’s madeleine. Only, where Proust’s reverie is particularly French and particularly sweet, Hodgson’s traumatic spiel is kicked off by a bodily function that is universally embarrassing. In an interview, he has spoken about the hiccup as a legacy of mankind’s aquatic ancestry — a memory buried in the genes, perhaps — but it is also undoubtedly overcoded with a whole range of social presumptions. We think of nerves, of drunkenness, of our own bodies rising against us. Hiccups disrupt language. They are always inappropriate. There is never a good time for them.
Joseph Darlington reviews Andrew Hodgson‘s Mnemic Symbols.
The extent to which The Dinner Guest is a novel, however, can be debated. The narrator shares a name and history with the author. The major facts surrounding the two deaths don’t appear to be exaggerated either, at least beyond that which is verifiable by public record. Presumably, the most baldly fictionalized portions are the minute details of the hours after Ybarra’s grandfather’s kidnapping, which happened before Ybarra was born, but even those moments, such as the narrator’s father struggle to free himself of handcuffs, feel culled from conversations, hardly out of line with the type of imaginative re-creations often seen in nonfiction.
Kyle Callert reviews The Dinner Guest by Gabrela Ybarra.
“I must formulate completely the work I’m going to undertake. I must search for the law to which all things submit.” Beginning at the beginning. Ah! The first word.
An extract from Palenque Hotel, a new novel by Louis Armand.
Close to five hundred photographs came back: seagulls, abandoned buildings, skyscrapers, street lights. There were holiday snaps mixed in with abstract photos, images concerned with shapes and the arrangement of shapes, taken in the late 1970’s, many taken in the dark and in the rain. My father is not present in any of the photographs because he is always behind the camera: this is his eye onto the world, only I don’t know why he wanted to remember and preserve these sights, what he was doing in these places, so late at night, why he kept these photographs. They are images that are supersaturated with biographical experience that I can’t decode. To paraphrase Freud, biographical truth as I wanted it was not to be had, and what I did have I could not seem to use.
By Stephanie Bishop.
I was reared as a world literature reader ( laughs). My parents were the children of immigrants and belonged to the intellectual left in New York. My father worked on decolonization in Africa and we spent time in Uganda. I remember reading Tagore and Achebe when I was very young, alongside Chinese folk tales and the epic of Gilgamesh. In my early twenties I lived in Senegal and Algeria and was steeped in extra-hexagonal French literature and political thought. So if I have reservations about world literature it’s not because I’m in favor of re-provincializing reading. It’s that I prefer a model of “world literatures in languages” over and against the institutional model of “World Lit” that one finds increasingly in the United States.
Krishnan Unni.P and Mantra Mukim interview Emily Apter.
His writing is simple and legible but perfect in ways that are hard to recognize at first. He untapped the potential of language, not as a poet—with meaning encrypted in words in that order—but as an oral storyteller—with meaning encrypted in narrative structure so it can be retold in other words. In “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista” (Decalogue of the Perfect Storyteller) he instructs the aspiring writer to describe an event with only the immediately evident words. He is always sparse. A never-ending sentence halts before something too harsh to say with an exclamation point or ellipsis. He insinuates the worst truths to the reader. His characters enter an illusory state. Silence is not a lie but a gesture of respect towards the humanity of the character.
By Elisa Taber.
The necessity to pay has been revealed in countless signs to be interpreted as letters of demand that must be answered. Intensifying heat, melting ice, rising seas, violent storms, drought, flooding, failing crops, mass migrations, and extinctions: what they point to is impossible to say except in terms of future finance, or the terms by which the presence of the debt may be restructured. That the nature of those terms cannot be thought about with any understanding in advance of their acceptance is no reason not to hope that that might happen.
By Christopher Clifton.