Carolyn Burdett on The Work (2017) I’ve been interested in psychoanalysis for a long time. Freudian psychoanalysis, like literature, is committed to words, supremely interested not only in what is said but also in how it gets said. For Freud, the bodily symptom that makes
Joseph Brooker on The Tempest at the Barbican Like many people I think of myself as revering William Shakespeare, and also imagine that I know the outline of his late play The Tempest (c.1611). But a few minutes into the current RSC production at the
Martin Eve on Nice Fish at the Harold Pinter Theatre The reviews were mixed and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Two men sitting on a sheet of ice, fishing and talking. For that is the plot of Nice Fish almost in its entirety, which
Joseph Brooker on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Every year the Nobel Prize for Literature generates speculation, lobbying and betting. Some names come up repeatedly. This time Haruki Murakami was said to be surging, before shares in Don DeLillo rose sharply. I saw someone remark online
Martin Eve on William Gaddis’s JR I am currently re-reading William Gaddis‘s monstrous 1975 novel, JR. While this is a book that defies easy plot summary, one of the central strands of the text concerns the eponymous eleven-year-old schoolboy, J. R. Vansant, and his adept manipulation
Roger Luckhurst on Basma Abdel Aziz, The Queue Dystopian fiction pours off the presses in such volume that the apocalyptic vision has become codified and oddly routine. It’s the end of the world as we know it and we feel fine. But for all the
What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. James Joyce, Ulysses Ghostbusters (1984) came from nowhere when I was a boy: a blockbuster whose scenario didn’t seem to resemble anything that