Adam Thirlwell’s novels include Politics, Lurid and Cute and, most recently, The Future Future.
In the era of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought about, to be argued over and interpreted, in the era when vernaculars became nationalist instruments, and a writer was bound to their first language not just pragmatically but politically. But...
Bruno Schulz was born in Drohobych in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1892. Except for small forays to Warsaw and Vienna, he hardly ever left his home town and died there at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi officer. Schulz published just two books of stories in his lifetime: Cinnamon Shops in 1934 and The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1937. They are...
Two pulp genres overlap in the opening to Mariana Enríquez’s novel Our Share of Night. At first it seems like a noir, a political thriller involving law enforcement and menace and outlaw heroes. Everything is taut and fractious: ‘It was already late and he needed to go and that hot day was going to be just like the next: if it rained and he was hit with the river’s...
Pola Oloixarac has written three novels, though calling them novels seems too reassuringly bland. They’re baroquely layered with ideas, hacker theory, anthropology, natural history, mythology, dystopias. I admire them very much, but reading them can also bring moments of boredom or impatience. Ideas are allowed to expand in unexpected habitats. Oloixarac’s characters give...
In Mario Levrero’s novel Empty Words a writer, unable to change the vast mess of his life, decides to improve one small part of it: his handwriting.
My graphological self-therapy begins today. This method (suggested a while ago by a crazy friend) stems from the notion – which is central to graphology – that there’s a profound connection between a person’s...
‘To abdicate your power is so much harder than it seems,’ the narrator of Lurid & Cute says. It’s a difficulty that Adam Thirlwell’s fiction up to this point has...
Borges said his essay ‘The Homeric Versions’ represented his first appearance as a Hellenist. ‘I do not think I shall ascend to a second,’ he added. This modest forecast...
You might think that Adam Thirlwell, as an author of self-absorbed sex comedies, had no obvious credentials for writing about the Arab Spring (the title of his first novel, Politics, was a joke)....
The Escape is Adam Thirlwell’s third book. His first novel, Politics, was published in 2003 and won some acclaim for its energetic smut and (less frequently) for its alternately faux-naif...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.