Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…
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Personal politics and the modern English language: Mary Jean Chan’s ‘Flèche’
There’s too much to praise in Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche: the characterful depths it presents of its persona, the problems they encounter with queer becoming, the gentle lyricism that appears straightforward but is anything but. It is about family, about love—and also about fencing. Of the topics that I could cover, I’m going to examine…
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The consolation of animals: Téa Obreht’s ‘Inland’
Téa Obreht’s Inland is extraordinary in its prosaic intensity, one of the many reasons it has been shortlisted for this year’s International Dylan Thomas Prize. The story depicts the lives of Nora on a farm during a drought in the Arizona territory in 1893, and the frontiersman Lurie as he arrives in Texas from eastern…
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Writing (a) genealogy: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard
In ‘Kombucha’, a prose poem about, among other things, menstrual mooncups, Jay Bernard’s persona asks: When I stare at these bottles, it’s blood that has been three times enlarged. Who says we have no genealogy? Who says that if I line them up, as ornaments, a blood archive, then it isn’t like us having had…
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‘Lot’ by Bryan Washington: a battle for an ordinary
Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic Books: 2019) is a short-story collection depicting the lives of several Houston citizens. One character’s story recurrently comes in and out of focus throughout Lot, but otherwise the stories transition between characters—mostly men—and explores how they experience the city. Another key element of the collection is its focus on who we’d…
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A stretched tapestry: Bernardino Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’
Twelve overlapping stories across over 450 pages. A novel ‘bursting at the seams’ (Guardian). A book without a single full-stop. Bernardino Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other invites scrutiny about its structure and how it stitches together the twelve narrative patches of the quilt. Or is it: … how it constructs the twelve-piece mosaic? I think…
Got any book recommendations?