Nicholas Taylor-Collins in front of a bookshelf

Nicholas Taylor-Collins

Literary researcher | Creative reader

Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing

  • Learning to read Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’

    Learning to read Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’

    Samantha Harvey‘s delicate 136-page novel Orbital won 2024’s Booker Prize. It marks a notable shift of the difficulty of the last few Booker winners—Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023), Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), Galgut’s The Promise (2021), and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020)—to an easier style, even if not a typical plot of a novel.…

  • The true reality of dreams in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

    The true reality of dreams in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

    In 2024, South Korea’s Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a 54-year-old author of eleven novels—only five of which have been translated into English—Han was viewed by some as an unexpected choice. The Swedish Academy—awarders of the Nobel Prize—praised Han ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the…

  • The afterlife in Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’

    The afterlife in Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’

    Rachel Cusk’s *Parade* (2024) intertwines stories of a painter named ‘G.’ and various women confronting life’s adversities. The novel’s fragmented structure reflects on themes of identity and gender. It coincidentally parallels Maurice Blanchot’s *The Instant of My Death*. Both works explore ‘death-in-life’—one of Cusk’s narrators grapples with her split self, while Blanchot’s protagonist experiences a…

  • Sea Witches and Hostage-Taking: A Dive into ‘Drift’ by Caryl Lewis

    Explore Caryl Lewis’s ‘Drift’ through a captivating blend of magical realism and mythological motifs. Delve into the complexities of hospitality as Nefyn rescues Hamza, intertwining with themes of nostalgia and the ‘Odyssey’. Lewis’s narrative unfolds a tale of homecoming and longing, echoing timeless narratives in a modern context.

  • The anti-Bildungsroman: Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’

    The anti-Bildungsroman: Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’

    In this post I explore the transformative journey of Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’, a contemporary retelling of Charles Dickens’s classic Bildungsroman ‘David Copperfield’, set in Appalachia amid opioid addiction. I examine the complexities of growth and stagnation, as Demon’s narrative navigates between traditional Bildungsroman elements and an intriguing anti-Bildung twist, shaping a poignant coming-of-age tale.

  • Language and the queer journey in Arinze Ifeakandu’s ‘God’s Children Are Little Broken Things’

    Language and the queer journey in Arinze Ifeakandu’s ‘God’s Children Are Little Broken Things’

    Arinze Ifeakandu‘s God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022) won the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. It’s a collection of nine short stories set in Nigeria—in Abuja and Kano, mostly—all of which have male queer stories at the heart. In none of the stories is being queer straightforward. Sometimes the difficulties…

Got any book recommendations?