Chris Power

Dec 21, 2024 | theguardian.com | Chris Power

How should one write about death – not as experienced by those who merely witness it, but by the people doing the actual dying? Many attempts have been made, but some favourites barge to the front. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy terrifies both us and his eponymous magistrate with the “black sack” into which Ivan is being pushed by “an invisible, invincible force”.

Nov 13, 2024 | msn.com | Chris Power

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Nov 13, 2024 | theguardian.com | Chris Power

In the early evening of 12 November 2015, three cars left Charleroi in Belgium, arriving a few hours later at a rented house in the northern suburbs of Paris. The occupants of the cars – or “the death convoy”, as they called it – were Islamic State terrorists who, the following night, rampaged through the French capital. , where a football friendly between France and Germany was being played. Arriving late, they were denied entry to the stadium and blew themselves up outside.

Nov 5, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Chris Power

In 2014, reflecting on his career to date, Hanif Kureishi remarked to an interviewer that the great thing about being a writer is that “every ten years you become somebody else”. Between the mid-1970s and early-1980s he served his apprenticeship, writing dirty stories for pornographic magazines and plays for the Royal Court.

Oct 26, 2024 | theguardian.com | Chris Power

In Amundsen, a short story by Alice Munro, a young woman comes to teach at a sanatorium during the second world war. Asked by a doctor what she knows about tuberculosis (TB), she tells him she has read The Magic Mountain. Like the Alpine peak above Davos on which it takes place, Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel casts its vast shadow over any fictional work about illness, let alone those set in TB clinics.