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4 weeks ago | 
newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro |Michael Prodger |Kate Mossman |Zoe Huxford
“Call me Ishmael”, the opening line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,commands the reader. In her exciting feminist reimagining of the classic, the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize shortlisted author Xiaolu Guo instructs the reader to call the narrator Ishmaelle. Guo’s plot follows a similar trajectory to the original. The cast is slightly changed; Captain Ahab becomes Captain Seneca and rather than sailing on the Pequod, Ishmaelle finds herself on the Nimrod.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Barney Horner |Rachel Cunliffe |Zuzanna Lachendro
Paul Theroux ought to know how to do it. The author of more than 30 works of fiction and some 20 of non-fiction, he has been writing for nearly 60 years. Nestled within his voluminous bibliography sit numerous collections of stories – including those written for Playboy in the 1970s and early 1980s. This new gathering displays plenty of the ease and adroitness garnered after all those years.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Zoe Huxford |Zuzanna Lachendro
People knew Eric Tucker as many things – boxer, steelworker, building labourer, habitué of working men’s clubs and bookmakers – but few knew this tall, unkempt, heavy-set man as a painter. Shortly before his death at 86 in 2018 he suggested to his brother that it might be nice to hold an exhibition of his work.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Megan Kenyon |Anna Leszkiewicz |Zuzanna Lachendro
The Swedish poet and artist Johanna Ekström died of cancer in 2022 at 51. She left behind 13 grey notebooks detailing the last years of her life: from October 2019 to X, the date on which she would die, even though she didn’t know exactly when that would be. It turned out to be 13 April and a week before she asked her oldest friend, the publisher and author Sigrid Rausing, to edit and finish the text.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Zuzanna Lachendro |Rachel Cunliffe |Zoe Huxford
“I was one continued shudder from the beginning to the end of the performance.” So said Abigail Adams in 1784 about the first mass-scale performance of Handel’s Messiah, written in 1741. Singers, players and audiences have continued to shudder ever since as the oratorio has become probably the most performed piece in the repertoire.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, a post-apocalyptic story of life in the aftermath of a bio-engineered pandemic, might not have made the most obvious source material for a contemporary ballet. But after the Covid-19 pandemic, the series seemed unnervingly prescient. And this co-production between the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, which had its European premiere at the Royal Opera House on 14 November, is a triumph.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |George Monaghan |Zuzanna Lachendro |Zoe Huxford
A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard by Simon JenkinsIn Britain, says the journalist and architectural buff Simon Jenkins, buildings have always been a battleground, where styles have grappled one against one or in a free-for-all: classicism vs gothic vs baroque vs modernism. If building is about structure, then architecture, he says, is about “how we choose to clothe that structure with meaning or delight”.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro
Born in 1989 in Chigasaki, Han Smith grew up in Japan, Russia, the UK and elsewhere. Han Smith, a queer writer, translator and adult literacy teacher, is the recipient of a 2019/2020 London Writers Award. Her debut novel Portraits of the Palace of Wrecking and Creativity examines historical memory through a series of 77 portraits centring on two unnamed characters: the mercurial “almost daughter” and the “woman with a cave inside her”.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Harry Clarke-Ezzidio |Zuzanna Lachendro |Barney Horner |Nicholas Harris
Taking the Lead: A Dog at Number 10 by John CraceBoris Johnson be warned – another political “big beast” is releasing a memoir this autumn: that of Herbert Hound – Spad, Westminster veteran and… cockapoo. Like any SW1 memoirist, Hound details tales of triumph, failure and enduring feuds – most notably with Larry, the long-serving Downing Street cat, who is threatened by the prospect of quadruped rivalry at No 10.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro |Neel Mukherjee
Three debut novels are among the six works shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. The £10,000 award, run in association with the New Statesman, celebrates fiction from Britain and Ireland that “breaks the mould and extends the possibilities of the novel form”.
