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Jan 8, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Arts ReviewA remake |J. S. Barnes |Adam Mars-Jones |colin grant
The Transylvanian Count Dracula is a shapeshifter in multiple senses. In Bram Stoker’s novel of 1897 he is seen frequently to transform, moving from an old man to a young one and from human form into a bat, a dog and a column of mist. In terms of the archetypes of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, he is both Shadow and Shapeshifter: a being composed of pure malevolence who also twists and changes, remaining one step ahead of his adversaries until the end.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones
Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones |Mary Beard |Vanessa Curtis |J. E. Smyth
Dear Pedro Almodóvar, I resisted your early films when they came out, put off by the naughty-boy transgressions and failing to recognize their vitality and underlying good humour. Then, in 1988, the first sequence of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made a convert of me, with the camera on a level with Carmen Maura’s feet as she paced in desperation back and forth across a polished floor like a cornered tigress in high heels.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Vanessa Curtis |Adam Mars-Jones |J. E. Smyth |Philippa Snow
In a market crowded with full-length biographies of Vivien Leigh, Lyndsy Spence wisely refrains from adding another one. Instead she focuses on the years 1953–67, covering the period when Leigh was beginning to lose her grip on reality due to an escalation of bipolar illness. She had already won Oscars for the roles of Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois, and her high-profile marriage to Laurence Olivier was failing, damaged by his repeated infidelities and her fragile mental health.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones
Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Rebecca Watson |Adam Mars-Jones
Rebecca Watson’s I Will Crash, her second novel, takes as its subject sibling rivalry, though the phrase seems too mild. Brother-sister conflict most often appears (as it does for instance in Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles) in the guise of a fatal closeness, but the struggle between Rosa, the book’s narrator, and her unnamed brother is a radical antagonism – even if his successful campaign of torture and intimidation when they were teenagers wasn’t visible to outsiders or their parents.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Neel Mukherjee |Adam Mars-Jones
Promoting literary fiction can seem like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the finished version settles on ‘a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them’.
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May 15, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones |Álvaro Enrigue |Natasha Wimmer
Culture shock seems too mild a phrase to describe the arrival of Europeans in South and Central America. In his 1976 maverick classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (its category speculative neurohistory, at a guess), Julian Jaynes proposes that, at the time Pizarro and his men reached them, the Inca didn’t have full mental autonomy but only ‘protosubjectivity’.
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May 15, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones
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Jan 31, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Samantha Harvey |Adam Mars-Jones
To capture the world in a day was one of literary modernism’s defining ventures, with Ulysses setting the standard for exhaustiveness. Restricting the action to a single day is a mild piece of formalism, certainly when compared with some self-imposed contortions, but it disrupts standard novelistic workings just the same. Plot can more or less evaporate, replaced by less strident patterns of significance. What happens in Ulysses?
