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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Claire Lowdon
Welcome to the TLSTo access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe here
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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Rohan Maitzen |Suzi Feay |Claire Lowdon |Alice Wadsworth
“No artist will be found greater as an artist than he was as a thinker”, wrote David Masson in British Novelists and Their Styles (1859); thus, “the desirable arrangement might be either that our novelists were philosophers, or that philosophers were our novelists”.
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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Suzi Feay |Rohan Maitzen |Claire Lowdon |moralityBy Rohan Maitzen
Katherine Rundell Seamus Heaney wrote, “We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves”; that, and to forward each other.
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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Claire Lowdon
Helen Garner, right, with her daughter Alice, 2006 | © Fairfax Media via Getty Images
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Mar 19, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Claire Lowdon
Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
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Feb 19, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Randy Boyagoda |Toby Lichtig |Kevin Brazil |Claire Lowdon
The opening sequence of Kev Lambert’s May Our Joy Endure signals the novel’s intent. Lambert devotes whole pages of prose to the sights, sounds and smells, and the inner lives of guests, at a decadent birthday party at a private residence in a skyscraper in Montreal. Suggestive of the novel’s larger dynamics, the paragraph-length sentences pile up to balance on a one-word, standalone sentence: “Céline”.
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Feb 12, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Claire Lowdon |Beejay Silcox |Conor Truax |Damon Galgut
Han Kang was born in Gwangju in South Korea in 1970. Her family moved to Seoul four months before the Gwangju uprising, which took place in May 1980, during which the South Korean military violently suppressed student-led democratic protests and massacred up to 2,300 people. Han Kang researched the subject extensively for Human Acts (TLS, March 25, 2016; translated by Deborah Smith), now widely considered her masterwork.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Damon Galgut |Beejay Silcox |Conor Truax |Claire Lowdon
Despite its shocking subject matter (rape, incest, suicide), Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (TLS, June 14, 2013), was largely critiqued in terms of its use of language. That said, the violence McBride wreaked on sentences was also, in its way, quite shocking. The opening paragraph gives a flavour: For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes, you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Lindsey Hilsum |Conor Truax |Claire Lowdon |Beejay Silcox
In Gaza, parents have taken to writing their children’s names on their legs in black marker pen so, if the family is separated during an Israeli bombing, they have some hope of finding each other again; or at least of being able to identify a body. Medics are labelling a growing number of injured children “WCNSF” – Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.
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Nov 2, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Claire Lowdon
An Irishman, an Austrian and a Norwegian walk into a bar and the bartender says: “No full stops? You must be joking!”Jon Fosse, the 65-year-old Norwegian who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2023, is always mentioned in the same breath as Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. The three men have a lot in common. Staggeringly prolific across the board — poems, plays, novels, essays — their bibliographies run to several pages. The prose works employ unconventional punctuation and formatting.
