Benjamin Markovits

Oct 29, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Benjamin Markovits

Will Smith in I, Robot (2004) Credit: Alamy Dystopian fiction tends to point the finger at the present, rather than at some imagined future. Helen Phillips, in her third book Hum, has added a series of endnotes describing her sources for the depressing aspects of the world that she tries to shape into a plot: “The number of birds in the northern part of the continent has declined by three billion… According to a new survey, more humans had experienced intense negative emotions in the past...

Aug 14, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Benjamin Markovits

Shy Creatures is the ninth novel by Clare Chambers Credit: Anna McCarthy Early in Clare Chambers’s new novel, Shy Creatures, there’s a sly reference to some of her literary forebears: “[Helen] was coming round to Larkin, although privately she preferred Betjeman, whom Gil considered a ‘silly old maid’... Virginia Woolf was ‘mostly unreadable’, DH Lawrence was a genius, Graham Greene was ‘fiction not literature’” – and so on. Sly, on a couple of fronts. Chambers has been compared to both...

Jul 24, 2024 | electricliterature.com | Angie Abdou |Benjamin Markovits |Richard Wagamese |Taylor Jenkins Reid

Because athleticism is often regarded as the antithesis of intellectualism (the jock/nerd dichotomy remains commonplace), books about sport get overlooked as being non-serious, non-literary, or unimportant. People think they’re just fun. And they are fun. Sports are fun, so why wouldn’t the associated novels be? And they’re usually wonderfully structured—the training camp, the game, the season: they all translate perfectly into narrative structure—which can make them a pace-y read.

Jun 11, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Benjamin Markovits

The Hangover, 1887-9. by Toulouse-Lautrec Credit: Alamy Dennis Monk, the narrator of Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties, has just quit drinking, and returned to his parents’ house outside Philadelphia. He’s 26 and has no real prospects, “no job, no girlfriend”.

May 1, 2024 | theguardian.com | Benjamin Markovits |Robert McCrum |Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan: ‘Our supreme postmodernist’ Photograph: Joel Ryan/AP British novelist The exquisite chapter of domestic accidents that opens Paul Auster’s final novel, Baumgartner, leaves us with a microcosm of all that drew a worldwide, discerning readership to this super-abundantly gifted, big-hearted novelist: a limpid present tense; a subtle awareness, comic as well as tragic, of what Virgil identified as “sunt lacrimae rerum” – there are tears in the nature of things – which, in Paul’s...