Hotel by Joanna Walsh, is a book in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. It is essentially a memoir in the context of visits made to hotels by a reviewer who is at that time undergoing a personal marital breakdown.
Read MoreIn the absence of a monarchy, the king and queen both having gone missing, and the princess being unwilling to govern, a council has hastily been formed to address the situation.
Read MoreThe first time I read More Pricks Than Kicks I was assailed by terrible cramps that rippled up and down the front of my torso until I stopped reading. It seemed appropriate. Echo’s Bones is a long short story originally intended as the ‘recessional’ to More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett’s 1934 collection of stories about Belacqua – Dubliner, eternal student, abject sufferer from his own body: goitre, hammer toe, sexual dysfunction and moral turpitude.
Read Moreby Joanna Walsh I started the Twitter hashtag #readwomen2014 around some Cartes de Voeux I made, linking the French tradition of sending New Year’s Cards with the word Voeux which mean good wishes, and also ‘vow’. I’d followed a couple of recent projects in which readers vowed to spend a period of time reading books…
Read MoreFrom A Bigger Splash, David Hockney, 1967 by Joanna Walsh My friend is here with me. She has agreed to share the house I have rented for the summer. I see my friend in her swimsuit. She has good legs, very good legs. I can see them but I cannot see my own legs. If…
Read MoreMasha Tupitsyn. Drawing by Joanna Walsh by Joanna Walsh Masha Tupitsyn calls her new work, Love Dog, “The second instalment in my series of immaterial writing.” Her first instalment, Laconia – 1,200 Tweets on Film, made me want to tweet a response to her second. Aphoristic Twitter seems an appropriate medium for what Montaigne called…
Read MoreThe Centurion’s Servant, Stanley Spencer, 1914 by Joanna Walsh La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams, by Georges Perec, translated by Daniel Levin Becker, Melville House, 272 pp. Along with a poorly identified person (maybe my aunt), I am visiting a sort of colonial trading post. At the very back of one room we come upon a…
Read MoreAt a reading I gave in Seattle two years ago, a man with white hair told me he had once lived in Brazil and had named his daughter after Clarice Lispector..
Read More‘We make art with our cunt,’ wrote ’90s cyberfeminists, VNS Matrix. ‘Gender abolitionism’ (Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, 2015) has marked a shift in rhetoric, and Cornelia Sollfrank was the only 2017 delegate I remember to use the c-word
Read MoreThe Booker prize website says ‘It is a measure of quality of the original drafting that the main ambitions of the prize have not changed.
Read MoreNear the beginning of Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel, How Should a Person Be?, the narrator—coyly, “Sheila”—recalls a jilted ex-lover’s composition of “an outline for a play about [her] life—how it would unfold, decade by decade.”
Read MoreI read Molloy for the first and second time in an unlovely Grove Press mass-market paperback that contained all three books of Beckett’s trilogy, with yellowed pages and crowded gutters.
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