Non-fiction
Prophet of gloom: The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Notwithstanding the occasional gnomic aside to the effect that no science is untouched by magic, Gray has hitherto upheld the distinction between scientific progress, which is a fact of history, and human progress, which is a modern myth. But in his new book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, this distinction begins perceptibly to blur.
Aggressively middling: The Bourgeois & Distant Reading by Franco Moretti
It was when I turned to The Bourgeois that I really got a sense of Moretti’s epistemological superiority over most of his humanities competitors… It is not that the scientific team-man has simply trumped or supplanted the delicately tuned aesthetician. It is that Moretti has become both simultaneously, a lonely centaur or Janus-faced creature, at once historically minded and future oriented, sentimental and technicist, elegiac and plain speaking.
Horses for courses: On Writing by A.L. Kennedy
It is Kennedy’s belief that lived experience is essential to the writing process and needs to be integrated into the way writing is taught. Inviting a horse to the writing workshop is not her only irreverent suggestion. She also proposes that the student group and their teacher might benefit from sharing a meal, attending a concert together, or taking a walk.
Promiscuous subterranean bohemians: The Love-charm of Bombs
Feigel has gathered together a half-dozen writers – Graham Greene, Henry Green (the pen-name of Henry Yorke), Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, and the little-known Hilde Spiel – and traced their lives, loves and works through the first shattering attacks in 1940-41 to the lull, and then the resumption in 1944, as the pilotless V-1 and V-2 attacks began.
Low Theory
Wark’s two books work sequentially, although they also loop around the same figures and concepts. They could be treated as histories of the Situationist milieu and its aftermaths, but to do so would miss entirely what makes them such compelling and, at times, hilarious reading.
Late Recognition: The Letters of William Gaddis
The publication of The Letters of William Gaddis is significant because it presents the first direct and unveiled access to this ‘reclusive’ author. For those of us who know and love Gaddis’s work, however, there is something discomfiting about such personal revelations.