Berfrois

Albert Rolls on Thomas Pynchon

Albert Rolls on Thomas Pynchon

The Crying of Lot 49 is an embryonic encyclopaedic novel...

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Hazzard’s Humans

Hazzard’s Humans

Or so very little longer...

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Electricity was the fuel of choice for scientific romancers…

Electricity was the fuel of choice for scientific romancers…

During America’s Gilded Age, the future seemed to pulse with electrical possibility...

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Trigger Warning: Trauma

Trigger Warning: Trauma

The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost...

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Wit, Sarcasm, Satire

Wit, Sarcasm, Satire

The Dud Avocado follows the period young Sally Gorce chooses an expat existence in Paris over college...

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Across Poisoned Oceans

Across Poisoned Oceans

The pair fly to Japan where they discover the virtual world conjured via the internet does not reflect reality...

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Woolf’s Glimpses of Lawrence by Andre Gerard

Woolf’s Glimpses of Lawrence by Andre Gerard

Whether or not The Trespasser helped Woolf shape Night and Day, there may be glints of Lawrence’s novel in To the Lighthouse...

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Medha Singh on J.M. Coetzee

Medha Singh on J.M. Coetzee

The postcolonial school may have claimed Coetzee, yet his attempt at a satirical sort of self canonisation actively resists any and all approaches to his writing within a single framework...

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Isha Badoniya on Erik Hoel

Isha Badoniya on Erik Hoel

The neuroscientist vows not to ruin his new beginnings as he re-enters academic life...

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Eric D. Lehman on Karl Ove Knausgaard

Eric D. Lehman on Karl Ove Knausgaard

When I picked up the first book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle, I had an unusual reaction: “It’s boring”...

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In Conversation With Works of Science Fiction

In Conversation With Works of Science Fiction

Well, OK, do you want to ask, like, “How did my parents feel about me going into a creative field?” Is that what you’re working your way toward?

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Nicholas Rombes: One Perfect Sentence #2

Nicholas Rombes: One Perfect Sentence #2

by Nicholas Rombes From Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, 2016. Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be...

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1984 in the 1940s

1984 in the 1940s

Although the novel begins on April 4, 1984, in the dystopian empire of Oceania, its inspiration was England, circa 1946. The food is bad, and there isn’t enough of it.

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Powerfully Millennial

Powerfully Millennial

“The great millennial novelist”—the mantle has been thrust, by Boomers and Gen Xers alike, upon the Irish writer Sally Rooney, whose two carefully observed and gentle comedies of manners...

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Texting Under Drone-Crossed Skies

Texting Under Drone-Crossed Skies

The war in Afghanistan is now in its seventeenth year and, despite recent attempts to broker a lasting peace, the fight against the Taliban keeps dragging on.

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Joel Gn on Laurie Stone

Joel Gn on Laurie Stone

Most of Stone’s writings touch on the transformations from loves lost and found. In particular, the narrator’s relationship with her mother, whom she affectionately refers to as ‘Toby’ is at times strained...

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For a soi-disant parable-writer, Muriel Spark is surprisingly social in her comedy…

For a soi-disant parable-writer, Muriel Spark is surprisingly social in her comedy…

Spark’s novels – 22 in all – are the product of a ruthlessly confident, even clairvoyant sensibility, and fuse an impossible range of tones and strengths.

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