Back in May, Faber and Faber reissued Alexander Baron’s brilliant novel The Lowlife, the entertaining, picaresque story of an amiable Jewish charmer trying to get by on his wits in seedy post-war London. The book is a welcome addition to the excellent Faber Editions series, which aims to spotlight rediscovered gems from the publisher’s archive […]
London Novels – ten favourites from my shelves
I have long been a fan of Shirley Jackson’s unnerving fiction, which never fails to unsettle me. From the creeping sense of dread running through her short stories to the magical but disturbing world of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson excels at stripping back the surface veneer of seemingly polite society, exposing […]
Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
With mid-April on the horizon, we’re heading towards another of Karen and Simon’s highly enjoyable ‘Club’ weeks – focusing, in this instance, on 1952. Starting Monday 21st April, the #1952Club is a week-long celebration of books first published that year. These reading events are always great fun, with various tweets, reviews and recommendations flying around […]
The forthcoming #1952 Club – some books I highly recommend!
“I think that I shall never knowWhy I am thus, and I am so.”—A Fairly Sad Tale, Dorothy Parker ⧫ The author of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, Violette Leduc, was famously in love with and rejected by Simone de Beauvoir—author of the seminal feminist text, The Second Sex. Leduc wrote of this […]
Violette Leduc’s ‘The Lady and the Little Fox Fur & the Art of Distance
I can’t quite recall where I first heard about Donald Henderson’s excellent novel, Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper – a wickedly satirical portrayal of a murderer operating under the cloak of the London Blitz. It may have been Backlisted, always an excellent source of lesser-known gems, or possibly during a discussion about boarding-house novels, a […]
Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson
I have long wanted to try something by Vivian Gornick, the American writer and critic who started her career at the Village Voice in the late 1960s. Since then, Gornick’s work has appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books, while in 2019, the New […]
The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
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