Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thirlwell’s novels include Politics, Lurid and Cute and, most recently, The Future Future.

This is a miniature dictionary of the invented English in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s charming, flawed and exhausting new novel:

bik (Yiddish: bull) – doormanlatke (Yiddish: potato cake) – 1. police cap 2. policemannoz (Yiddish: nose) – policemanshammes (Yiddish: assistant to rabbi, beadle) – policemansholem (Yiddish: peace) – gun

‘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...

Read more reviews

Frazzle: Chinese Whispers

Michael Wood, 8 August 2013

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...

Read more reviews

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)....

Read more reviews

A Taste for the Obvious: Adam Thirlwell

Brian Dillon, 22 October 2009

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 more reviews

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.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences