He starred in Peep Show, Green Wing and Wonka – and his first novel won an award. Now the star is making operas with 64 homeless people. Not bad going for someone who was written off by his teachersPaterson Joseph is, by his own admission, an unlikely opera librettist. He had turned 50 by the time he got round to going to one, and only went because he was in it, as the “crazy” voice of God in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. “It’s not my world,” says the actor. But therein lies part of his mission: as a black Londoner written off by the school system, his life was transformed by the goldmine he discovered while truanting down at his local library.One of his discoveries, as “a melancholy teen”, was Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. “I remember getting it out of the library,” he says, “just because it was a small book. And I started reading this poem out loud, at night in my bedroom. And I laughed – but I was also frightened and frustrated, weeping at the tragedy of it. When I closed the book, it was dawn.” Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2024-05-27 04:00:13 UTC ]
Lauren Oyler’s debut novel brings the reader down a rabbit hole of endless, mindless scrolling, online identities, and conspiracy theories. Fake Accounts follows the journey of a young woman after she discovers that her boyfriend is running an Instagram account spouting dangerous conspiracies... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2021-02-26 12:00:00 UTC ]
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In “The Committed,” a follow-up to “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nameless spy navigates a Paris underworld rife with drug deals, violence and colonialism’s ghosts. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-02-26 10:00:03 UTC ]
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In Daniel Loedel’s haunting debut novel Hades, Argentina, Tomás Orilla returns to Buenos Aires—“a city made for forgetting as much for nostalgia”—ten years after fleeing the military dictatorship whose regime disappeared upwards of 30,000 thousand political opponents, including Isabel Aroztegui,... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2021-02-25 12:00:00 UTC ]
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The movie adaptation of Nico Walker’s Cherry—the best-selling debut novel about an Iraq veteran turned heroin addict turned bank robber—will be released in theaters in two days, directed by the Russo Brothers (who you might know from Avengers) and starring Tom Holland (who you might know from... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-24 18:21:44 UTC ]
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Faber is to publish Lucy Caldwell's first novel in nearly a decade, These Days. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-23 01:30:10 UTC ]
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Nancy Johnson’s debut novel “The Kindest Lie” is a well-crafted exploration of class, race, and culture; of motherhood; and of family ties. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2021-02-17 13:46:20 UTC ]
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Nancy Johnson’s debut novel “The Kindest Lie” is a well-crafted exploration of class, race, and culture; of motherhood; and of family ties. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2021-02-17 13:46:20 UTC ]
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READING PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S first novel feels a lot like having your brain poisoned by the internet — or at least like having that particular contemporary condition understood. No One Is Talking About This is a searing entry into the rapidly emerging pantheon of digital culture literature, told... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 16:00:53 UTC ]
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The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-02-16 15:21:36 UTC ]
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Picador has netted New Animal, a “sharp and witty” debut novel by poet and sculptor Ella Baxter. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-14 20:43:00 UTC ]
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Wildfire has pre-empted former Home Secretary and memoirist Alan Johnson’s debut novel, The Late Train to Gipsy Hill. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-10 23:51:47 UTC ]
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On October 5, this timeline will be blessed/cursed by Jonathan Franzen’s first novel since 2015: Crossroads, or, if you’re not abbreviating, Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1. It’s the first novel of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, which, yes, nods to the doomed... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-10 17:59:29 UTC ]
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HarperNorth has snared its first fiction acquisition, a gritty gangland thriller by Karen Woods. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-08 01:06:27 UTC ]
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DURING ONE KEY MOMENT, E. Lily Yu’s disquieting debut novel On Fragile Waves offers a kind of authorial self-critique regarding the representation of diasporic migrants. A character Yu calls “the writer” has traveled to Australia to interview asylum seekers in the Afghan migrant community there... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-06 16:00:46 UTC ]
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Today, as we have done in years past, LARB honors Black History Month by highlighting a series of reviews, essays, interviews, and exchanges of letters we published in January. Below you will find a poignant essay on the Compton Christmas Parade; a penetrating interview with Kiley Reid, author... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-01 13:30:13 UTC ]
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“Fake Accounts,” Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, considers how social media has reconfigured our behavior, relationships and how we think of ourselves. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-02-01 10:00:02 UTC ]
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The best-selling author just found out that her debut novel is soon to be on the first lady’s bedside table. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-01-28 10:00:04 UTC ]
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Culture A still image from the film White Tiger (Netflix, 2021). After watching White Tiger, a writer contemplates the film alongside revolution in Egypt, Black Lives Matter protests, the film Parasite, and literary “complicated works of... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-01-27 20:33:27 UTC ]
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Weidenfeld & Nicolson is publishing the debut novel of comedian, actress and writer Isy Suttie, Jane is Trying, in July. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-01-27 11:15:14 UTC ]
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Oyler’s debut novel is about a smart, irascible narrator who is steeped in the concerns and tone of social media. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-01-26 21:16:27 UTC ]
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