Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine EvaristoSince studying Lara as a student, I have been a fan of Bernardine Evaristo’s work, and am delighted to see her win the Booker Prize this year. Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve black characters with different backgrounds and experiences, most of whom identify as female, living in London. I’ve enjoyed getting to know them through my reading and seeing how their lives are linked or overlap in different ways. What I found particularly interesting about this book is how each character responds in their own way to the universal questions of self and identity, particularly the tensions between personal, public and political gender discourse and the effect it has on the relationships the characters have with others. This feels like a very important book, and a must-read if you’re interested in what’s happening in UK fiction today.Rachel Stevens, Director LiteratureCommon People - An Anthology of Working-class Writers (ed Kit de Waal). An exceptional collection of essays, poems, memoir and short stories celebrating working-class life, culture and literature. There are many highlights, but I especially recommend Lisa McInnery’s essay ‘Working Class: An Escape Manual’, which considers how working-class writers and artists are co-opted into other identities when they achieve success. Debut author Adam Sharp’s ‘Play’, a memoir of his relationship with a substance-addicted father, is poignant and deftly handled - he’s a writer to... Continue reading at 'British Council global'
[ British Council global | 2019-10-30 09:49:28 UTC ]
Explorer and biologist Roman Dial reflects on parenting in this memoir of the search for his son, who vanished while solo hiking in Costa Rica. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2020-02-12 23:38:32 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Dustin Pickering The introductory notes to Quesadilla and Other Adventures (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, lay the ground plan for the anthology. “Food is history,” writes Ganguly. “Food is memory. Food is... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-02-11 13:46:44 UTC ]
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The pop star-turned-fashion mogul was always defined by men. Now, she’s defining herself. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-11 13:43:43 UTC ]
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Adrienne Miller’s memoir chronicles her tenure as fiction editor of Esquire in the 1990s and her rocky relationship with David Foster Wallace, the era’s iconic novelist. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-02-11 10:00:07 UTC ]
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When you’re writing a memoir, you find that you’re obliged to confront your own ideas about the nature of memory. In Gore Vidal’s own splendid memoir Palimpsest, he suggests that when we remember an event, we don’t remember it as it actually happened, but rather that we remember our memory of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-11 09:48:31 UTC ]
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Vivian Gornick and the revolution that won’t end: John Freeman profiles the author of Unfinished Business. | Lit Hub “What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?” Zan Romanoff on Adrienne Miller’s memoir of life with literary men, including David Foster Wallace. | Lit Hub “It... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-10 09:49:30 UTC ]
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From Secret Barristers to pseudonymous paramedics and White House moles, Anon is writing a lot of books these days – and identifying some unexpected truths“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Today, Anonymous is probably an outraged employee in a public service: a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-02-10 00:00:19 UTC ]
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In her new memoir "Open Book," singer and former reality-TV star Jessica Simpson opens up about sexual abuse, addiction and dating John Mayer. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-02-05 14:54:55 UTC ]
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I feel creatively lost most of the time. It doesn’t matter if I’m beginning a fresh project, wading through the middle, or racing toward the end—I often find myself in a fugue state that makes it impossible for me to understand what I’m doing, even as I’m doing it. This is what I love about […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-05 09:48:59 UTC ]
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Novelist says that in the run-up to the 2016 election, she began to imagine a life where Clinton ‘made different choices, personally and professionally’Hillary Rodham Clinton recounts, in her memoir Living History, how Bill Clinton “asked me to marry him again, and again, and I always said no”.... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-02-04 12:14:07 UTC ]
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What if we believed women? That’s the question at the heart of the new anthology Believe Me, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti which gathers together more than two-dozen leading voices on gender, power, and the most pressing issues shaping feminism today. Among them are Dahlia... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-04 09:49:39 UTC ]
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A Reese Witherspoon pick, a Silicon Valley memoir and the most talked about book of the year so far. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-04 00:16:04 UTC ]
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Now on its fifth series, the magic of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s comedy anthology remains its ability to turn even the most banal of scenarios into disturbingly thrilling TVThe fifth series of Inside No 9 opens with an episode set entirely in a referees’ changing room. Four... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-02-03 13:56:16 UTC ]
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Just a month into 2020 and my wishlist is already straining under the weight of all the new titles I’m looking forward to being published. Maybe it’s working in a bookshop or the concentrated effort I’ve been making to retreat into a fantasy-bubble when I’m at home, but I’ve found myself excited... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-03 09:50:09 UTC ]
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Because they have nothing to hide about anything, the White House has issued some kind of threat—according to CNN’s Jake Tapper—in a formal letter to former National Security Adviser John Bolton, whose forthcoming memoir from Simon & Schuster contains first-hand accounts of Donald Trump... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-29 17:43:05 UTC ]
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In his memoir 'Children of the Land,' poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo writes of border journeys, family separation and crossing a 'threshold of invisibility.' Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-01-29 15:00:08 UTC ]
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“But her emails.” Following the 2016 presidential election, those words entered American media lore as shorthand for one of the most grievous errors made by the press in its coverage of the campaign: that it overhyped Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to balance out Donald Trump’s... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-01-28 13:08:46 UTC ]
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Sarah DiGregorio’s new book combines memoir and reporting to explore changing treatments for babies born early. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-01-28 10:00:06 UTC ]
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Book Reviews John K. Cox Jurij Koch / Courtesy of Domowina-Verlag In the 1950s, a girl whom Jurij Koch knew in high school moved away from their hometown of Cottbus in East Germany. It was a case, he says in his recent memoir, of “Weg von Ulbricht, hin... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-01-27 20:47:13 UTC ]
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Some very important parts of former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming memoir, The Room Where It Happened: A Washington Memoir (Simon & Schuster, March 17), have leaked. The bit that everyone is talking about confirms that Donald Trump did, in fact, withhold aide to Ukraine... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-27 14:01:28 UTC ]
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