As a Brit in today’s political climate, it can sometimes be tough to find things to be proud of. One thing I always enjoy when I visit home, however, is a lovely Oxfam Bookshop. There’s at least one charity bookshop in every town, and they can be a great place to pick up a new …
Literature
The Ten Loves of Nishino (or The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino in the UK) is a novel that is, much like Kawakami’s other works, at once frolicking fun and darkly mournful. The out-of-order biography of an enigmatic frustration of a man tortured and strange, told through the intimate first-person perspectives of ten of his …
The Good Omens TV adaptation hit Amazon Prime like a meteor, and it caused a tsunami of positive whoops and cheers from long-time fans of the book and newcomers alike. The show, as adaptations go, is perfect. It’s a lesson in how to use costume, set, style, dialogue, and music to mimic the tone set …
As a student, I remember having a conversation with my friend in which he complained that Thomas Hardy spent three pages describing a field as if such an act were self-evidently inherently wrong. I waited for further elaboration. Was there something lacking from said description? Maybe he found Hardy’s prose to be weighty and clunky? …
Translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl The Storyteller is the wheel not reinvented, but refined. It’s a straightforward road-tripping adventure peppered with themes of family bonds, betrayal, and secrecy. It will teach you about the tragic and tumultuous history of Lebanon and its people, their suffering and their survival. It’s a …
Mattho Mandersloot is a translator from Amsterdam. He holds a degree in Classics from King’s College London and one in Translation from the School of Oriental and African Studies. Formerly a competitive taekwondo athlete, he now spends most of his time translating Korean fiction. In 2018, he won the World Literature Today Translation Prize and …
The shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 features six books, two of which are oddly similar retellings of stories from Greek mythology, each with a feminist edge to it. Madeline Miller’s Circe reworks the little-know story of Circe, an equally little-known goddess-turned-witch. It’s a biopic narrative with a love affair thrown in. Pat Barker’s …
Arab literature is rising in popularity – not yet soaring, but with Celestial Bodies having just won the Man Booker International Prize 2019, we’re going to be seeing an upwards trajectory that gets steeper and steeper in the months and years to come. As an introduction to Arab literature and anyone looking to explore its …
Poetry is often considered an art form that is entirely personal – both to the poet herself and to the reader. We bond with poems, project ourselves onto them, feel like we are a part of them. They can also be very hard to penetrate; they can intimidate and confuse us. For some, that confusion …
So, the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones has wrapped up. In my opinion, the previous two post-book seasons did a decent job at continuing the story that George R.R. Martin had laid out. Season 8, however, was lacking in character progression, decent dialogue, worthy endings to many story arcs, and any real …