Tag: fiction

What does your ideal home look like? Of course, it shall look like number 1, Nova Scotia House. This is a blog on Charlie Porter’s 2025 novel, ‘Nova Scotia House’, and the impossible  queer magical thinking it makes possible.

September 11, 2025

What does your ideal home look like? What does your ideal home look like? Of course, it shall look like number 1, Nova Scotia House. This is a blog on Charlie Porter’s 2025 novel, ‘Nova Scotia House’, and the impossible queer magical thinking it makes possible. The prompt question here is a kind of trick! … More What does your ideal home look like? Of course, it shall look like number 1, Nova Scotia House. This is a blog on Charlie Porter’s 2025 novel, ‘Nova Scotia House’, and the impossible  queer magical thinking it makes possible.

If it is the job of the novelist is to render the form of memory through many aspects of mind and bodily sensations, then this is one of the most superb novels ever. This is a blog on Claire Adam (2025) ‘Love Forms’.

September 6, 2025

‘Hills: … For many years these hills stayed safely in my memory. Even now, I can bring them to mind, or the feeling of being amidst them. Sometimes when I’m alone, my right hand lifts, and the hand sweeps diagonally upward, as if to trace the curving flank of one of those hills: a slow, … More If it is the job of the novelist is to render the form of memory through many aspects of mind and bodily sensations, then this is one of the most superb novels ever. This is a blog on Claire Adam (2025) ‘Love Forms’.

This is a blog on the rich novel that is Jonathan Buckley’s (2025) ‘One Boat’.

August 31, 2025

In metafiction, the narrator may make ad-hoc decisions about the nature of the fiction and adopt, if not fully implement, them in the very moment of narrating that fiction, as in the end of  Jonathan Buckley’s 2025 novel, One Boat where it appears that the narrator decides (on authoritative masculine persuasion) that her book is … More This is a blog on the rich novel that is Jonathan Buckley’s (2025) ‘One Boat’.

This is a blog on the translation and interpretation of East European migrant experience to America in Ledia Xhoga (2025) ‘Misinterpretation’.

August 23, 2025

‘The phrase Çdo gjë është e shrkruar – Everything is already written – came to mind. Albanians usually offered it to an anxious person for comfort, as a reminder that the cogs of some future event had been spinning since the beginning of time’.[1] This is a blog on the translation and interpretation of East … More This is a blog on the translation and interpretation of East European migrant experience to America in Ledia Xhoga (2025) ‘Misinterpretation’.

This is a blog on Ben Markovits (2025) ‘The Rest Our Lives’ London, Faber.

August 19, 2025

Thinking of his father, John Layward, who has ‘He is gone into the world of light,’ inscribed on his flat grave, the protagonist and narrator, Tom Layward, of Ben Markovits’ Booker-longlisted novel wonders whether that proud man’s ‘hatred of religion’ ‘was only important to him in the context of the battle with my mother’. So … More This is a blog on Ben Markovits (2025) ‘The Rest Our Lives’ London, Faber.

If I use the verb ‘to write’, do I really mean that what I write must or should endure

August 17, 2025

The best known quatrain of Persian Poetry, in stolid Victorian translation is that from what The Poetry Foundation calls the ‘Rubáiyát, his collection of hundreds of quatrains (or rubais), was first translated from Farsi into English in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald’, attributed to Omar Khayyam. There are versions on versions of the quatrains translated, not least by Fitzgerald . … More If I use the verb ‘to write’, do I really mean that what I write must or should endure

This is a blog on the role of endings in the modern metafictional novel and the light shed on that role by Maria Reva (2025) ‘Endling’ London, Virago Press.

August 15, 2025

‘She felt a small pang of resentment: the endling’s last moments on Earth, and it pined over not getting laid. Of course this was normal. If anything, endlings should pine all the louder for the end of their species. … // At least gastropods yearned in silence, …’.[1] This is a blog on the role … More This is a blog on the role of endings in the modern metafictional novel and the light shed on that role by Maria Reva (2025) ‘Endling’ London, Virago Press.

This is a blog on  Benjamin Wood (2025) ‘Seascraper’.

August 14, 2025

‘Edgar’s almost shrouded by the white swell of the fog. … All of Longferry – the tall spires of the churches and the chimney-tops of the terraces receding to the lights of other towns – has been snuffed out’. I think no other modern novel I know about has such a sense of being near … More This is a blog on  Benjamin Wood (2025) ‘Seascraper’.

This is a blog on Natasha Brown (2025) ‘Universality’.

August 8, 2025

“Working families, small communities, traditional British industries and jobs. We used to value these things”.[1]Sometimes we wonder if this was said by a fictional columnist or own present prime Minister (and I won’t answer ‘whether I have a problem with our prime minister’: Natasha Brown meant Rishi Sunak; I, of course, mean Sir Keir Starmer’s … More This is a blog on Natasha Brown (2025) ‘Universality’.

This is a blog on Katie Kitamura  (2025) ‘Audition’.

August 5, 2025

Is the idea that psychosocial or other roles are ‘parts’ played upon the stage a tired metaphor (from the too-often quoted lines of Shakespeare’s jester, Jacques, from As You Like It: ‘All the world’s a stage, …’). Why might modern novels then take up that idea again, other than to keep saying and showing the … More This is a blog on Katie Kitamura  (2025) ‘Audition’.

‘”What d’you mean?” / “What do you mean what do I mean?”‘ Do we ever know what a person ‘means’? Is that the issue in David Szalay’s 2025 Booker-longlisted novel ‘Flesh’.

August 2, 2025

‘”What d’you mean?” / “What do you mean what do I mean?”‘[1] Do we ever know what a person ‘means’? Is that the issue in David Szalay’s 2025 Booker-longlisted novel ‘Flesh‘. Male novelists, with a deserved reputation for being interested in the nature of contemporary constructions of masculinity like David Szalay are perhaps too vulnerable … More ‘”What d’you mean?” / “What do you mean what do I mean?”‘ Do we ever know what a person ‘means’? Is that the issue in David Szalay’s 2025 Booker-longlisted novel ‘Flesh’.

New directions in the queer novel. In a recent example from those written by the ‘best novelists’ of our time, William Rayfet Hunter’s debut novel ‘Sunstruck’ (2025), the story is often about the dual function of telling stories in society.

July 22, 2025

The job of the novel is not only to tell a story but to edit it to fit some kind of purpose that is its raison d’être. Yet simultaneously questioning its own purpose has also been a feature of the novel since its inception in the best novelists. In a recent example from those written … More New directions in the queer novel. In a recent example from those written by the ‘best novelists’ of our time, William Rayfet Hunter’s debut novel ‘Sunstruck’ (2025), the story is often about the dual function of telling stories in society.