Dr Joseph Brooker on La La Land I don’t love the phrase La La Land itself, but I have come to think this is a very good title, meaning: Fantasy – the film is a fantasy: it’s not going to be naturalism: people are going to burst
Dr Joseph Brooker on Eimear McBride in conversation with Jacqueline Rose On 25th January 2017 the acclaimed novelist Eimear McBride came to Birkbeck for a public conversation with Professor Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. One of the college’s largest lecture
Joseph Brooker on Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line at the British Library The British Library currently displays a large selection of maps from the 20th century. The maps are sorted into the themes: Mapping a New World (a general section, with emphasis on
Dr Joseph Brooker on Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon The US election this week has sent me back to Jonathan Lethem’s second novel, the science fiction picaresque Amnesia Moon (1995). The novel depicts a dystopian near future in which a catastrophe has fragmented America into a
Joseph Brooker on Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk Helen Macdonald is a writer on ecology and the history of science affiliated to the University of Cambridge. She is also an experienced falconer, who grew up fascinated by birds of prey and learned to handle
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
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
Joseph Brooker on reading the New Left Review. The New Left Review is a journal of leftist thought founded in the early 1960s. In 2000 it relaunched with a slightly different look – glossy, sleek, elegant, but still uniquely rigorous and austere. Not only does it