Tom Crewe

Tom Crewe’s first novel, The New Life, won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and is out now in paperback. He is a contributing editor at the LRB.

On​ 3 November 1876, two days after the unexpected death of his younger brother René, Gustave Caillebotte made his will. He was 28.

It is my wish that sufficient funds be allocated from my estate to finance in 1878, under the best possible conditions, the exhibition of the painters known as Intransigents or Impressionists. It is rather difficult for me to estimate today what the...

Letter

That’s what I like

19 February 2026

Seamus Perry begins his consideration of pluralism and modern poetry by noting William James’s admiration for G.K. Chesterton’s cheerful embrace of the multifariousness of ordinary life, the ‘huge impossible universe which stares us in the face’ (LRB, 19 February). Perry relates that in 1907 the two men met for tea in Rye, when William was visiting his brother Henry at Lamb House and Chesterton...
Letter

Mesmerised

26 June 2025

Tom Crewe writes: Christopher Waldo’s letter would be a great deal more convincing if he had attempted to explain the ‘singular beauty’ of any one of the sentences I quoted in my review. There, I made a detailed case that Vuong’s sentences don’t work, taking full account of his intentions. Simply stating in opposition that these sentences represent ‘originary fracture and eventual reconstitution’...

Something​ very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to...

Letter

Cartomania

17 April 2025

Tom Crewe writes: I certainly did enjoy Paul Frecker’s book, and am sorry to have provoked him to a defence of its copiousness, which is one of its great virtues. When I said there was ‘nothing on’ actors, artists and writers, I didn’t mean that no actor, artist or writer was mentioned, only that they weren’t given significant thematic treatment. Returning to some of the examples Frecker...

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