Lola Seaton

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Lola Seaton

A Reply to Malcolm Bull Why is there the amount of art that there is?’—the title of Malcolm Bull’s stimulating article—is an original, odd, question-provoking question.footnote1 Not least: how much art is there? We can perhaps imagine a time when one could have totted up all the finished paintings and sculptures coming out of artists’ workshops. In our era, however, matters are more ontologically complex.

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

Joan Didion, Thomas Powers observed after she died aged 87 in 2021, is “almost brutally direct, but it’s never entirely clear what she means to say” – including to her, one might add. Bluntness and a certain opacity, exactitude and elusiveness, even avoidance: this paradoxical blend, as Didion’s iconic status attests, proved to be culturally intoxicating. She set the forthright, cagey tone as early as her first, reputation-making essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

Nov 6, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

The Goldsmiths Prize was established a decade ago to celebrate a quality in contemporary novels that (oddly, given the name) is not especially common: novelty. Indeed the “novel” is a bit of a misnomer: breaking new formal ground – repurposing or discarding existing conventions, discovering or imposing fresh ones – is, among modern practitioners, by no means a universal impulse.

Oct 29, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

Jonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham in 1956 and grew up in Dudley. He studied English at Sussex University, then at King’s College London, where he specialised in the work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Buckley is the author of 12 novels and is drawn, as he puts it, to the “polyphonic, multi-faceted, episodic, fragmentary form”. His first, The Biography of Thomas Lang, published in 1997, was told in the form of letters between Lang’s brother and his would-be biographer.

Oct 22, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

Born in 1967, Mark Bowles grew up between Bradford and Leeds, and studied English at Liverpool and Oxford universities. He lives in south-east London, where he teaches at a secondary school. His first novel, All My Precious Madness, published in September by Galley Beggar Press, is a relentlessly intelligent and entertaining monologue: the musings, reminiscences and fulminations – often foul-mouthed – of Henry Nash, a London-based academic raised, like Bowles, near Bradford.