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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Toby Lichtig |Beejay Silcox |Michael LaPointe |Houman Barekat
Winner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902. Glimpses of CamelotA storyteller steeped in the ‘psychic life of the land’When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much.
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2 months ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Toby Lichtig |David Annand |Suzi Feay |Alice Jolly
Georges Perec’s novella Les Choses (1965; Things, 1990, translated by David Bellos) was a response to the golden years of the postwar boom. Subtitled Une histoire des années soixante (A story of the Sixties), and narrated in a wry, detached but not wholly unsympathetic third-person plural, it concerns a young Parisian couple, Sylvie and Jérôme, driven by “a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living”.
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2 months ago | 
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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Oct 30, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan |Amber Massie-Blomfield |Toby Lichtig |John Stokes
“Based on a true story” has become a fashionable tag to attach to any work of art. Some stories are, naturally, more interesting than others. In 1981 Nick Yarris, aged twenty, got into a fracas with a Pennsylvanian policeman. He was arrested, charged with a murder he hadn’t committed, found guilty and sentenced to death. Several attempts to overturn the conviction were thwarted by bad luck. All hope lost, Yarris wrote to the authorities asking to be executed.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Toby Lichtig
Since winning the Booker Prize in 2004 with “The Line of Beauty”—set during the brash middle years of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain—Alan Hollinghurst has produced a series of expansive novels set over entire generations. Our Evenings Random House 496 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Amazon Barnes & Noble Books a Million Bookshop “The Stranger’s Child” (2011) begins in 1913 and ends in 1980, and features characters alive in both eras.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Michael Caines |Robert Potts |Toby Lichtig |Martin Ivens
Poor Cyril Tourneur. This didactic writer of the early 1600s was once regarded as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy, a mighty work of its kind – and Tourneur therefore figured (in the words of Harold Jenkins) as “one of the most fiery and energetic imaginations possessed by any Elizabethan writer”. An Elizabethan (or even Jacobean) writer’s stock doesn’t get much higher than that.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
marketwatch.com | Toby Lichtig
By Toby Lichtig Deep in eastern Poland, on the edge of the protected Bia owie a forest, a group of eight translators of multiple languages gather for a convocation. The famous author they work with has finished her new novel and they must now bunk down together, with her, to work their strange alchemy, undisturbed.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Toby Lichtig
Surprisingly little is known about the four-and-a-half years Eric Blair spent in Burma as a policeman from 1922. There were letters sent to his parents and a sweetheart back home, now lost; and a few reminiscences from his former associates in the Raj, addled by time and, in some cases, drink.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Toby Lichtig
Enter Paul Theroux. The author of intrepid travelogues such as “The Great Railway Bazaar” (1975) and numerous exotically set, and exotically contrived, novels, including “The Mosquito Coast” (1981), was clearly unable to resist such literary catnip. Now into the silence he gives a mighty roar. His novel “Burma Sahib” is a colorful, action-packed saga of young Eric Blair’s colonial misdemeanors as he shucks off his youthful carapace and hardens into maturity—decline and fall, with a jungle backdrop.
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Dec 22, 2023 | 
newlinesmag.com | Toby Lichtig
With ever fewer survivors, the Holocaust is passing into history Listen to this storyWhen I was a kid, I knew a few grown-ups with tattoos. There was an ancient relative in Paris. There was a friend of my grandmother from Amsterdam. There was my Hebrew teacher, Mr. Wolf, who often rolled his sleeves up in the summer. Mr. Wolf had been in Auschwitz. I knew this because my mother told me. I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask him about it, being the awkward 12-year-old that I was.
