Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 291 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Anarchist Typesetters

Adam Mars-Jones: Hernan Diaz, 20 October 2022

Trust 
by Hernan Diaz.
Riverhead, 405 pp., £16.99, August, 978 1 5290 7449 9
Show More
Show More
... up appearances and deficit in social skills were remedied to some extent by his marriage to Helen Brevoort, the impoverished child of an old Albany family. Though her mother worked hard to contrive the match, Helen had her own reasons for going along with the machinations. She wanted not luxury but the freedom and ...

The Dark Horse Intimacy

Daniel Soar: Helen Simpson, 16 November 2000

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life 
by Helen Simpson.
Cape, 179 pp., £14.99, October 2000, 0 224 06082 1
Show More
Show More
... it involves an element of nightmare. How much better, then, to have reality that is also escape. Helen Simpson is one of those writers who make a virtue of reality by improving on it. Her stories belong to middle-aged or young women, not all of them mothers, who can just remember what it was like to be younger. She is Posy Simmonds without the social ...

At Sadie Coles

Brian Dillon: Helen Marten, 21 October 2021

... and there’s interesting: sometimes you just get lost. The first work I saw by the British artist Helen Marten, about eight years ago, was a sculpture resembling a makeshift desk or lectern, on and around which were strewn various baked goods, a sheet of beaten copper and a pile of pizzeria flyers showing Gerhard Richter’s 1988 painting Betty. The piece was ...

Blair-Speak

Gabriele Annan: Gish Jen’s Jokes, 6 January 2000

Who's Irish 
by Gish Jen.
Granta, 209 pp., £9.99, July 1999, 1 86207 276 0
Show More
Show More
... always a step ahead of Ralph. He marries a Chinese friend of hers called Hailan, who becomes Helen. Helen is very young, and was brought up rich and sheltered in China, so she starts several steps behind Ralph (in adaptability, that is), but soon overtakes him. The Revolution cuts them all off from their ...

On the Dizzy Edge

Merve Emre: Helen Garner, 21 March 2019

Monkey Grip 
by Helen Garner.
Text, 333 pp., £14.99, January 2019, 978 1 925773 15 6
Show More
The Children’s Bach 
by Helen Garner.
Text, 160 pp., £12.99, October 2018, 978 1 925773 04 0
Show More
Show More
... To read​ a novel by Helen Garner is to intrude on characters living their lives with no regard for your presence. You wander into their stories with the same sense of abandon with which they wander into Melbourne flophouses, drug dens, the homes of old and new lovers. ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives,’ begins Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), whose narrator, Nora, ushers you to the kitchen table then leaves you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975 ...

Whitlam Fictions

Zachary Leader, 16 February 1989

Kisses of the Enemy 
by Rodney Hall.
Faber, 622 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 571 15091 8
Show More
Postcards from Surfers 
by Helen Garner.
Bloomsbury, 180 pp., £11.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0272 2
Show More
Forty-Seventeen 
by Frank Moorhouse.
Faber, 175 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 571 15210 4
Show More
Show More
... international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from the Board’s largesse. The recent publication ...

Through the Gullet

Helen Cooper: Medieval recipes, 16 April 1998

The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy 
by Odile Redon and Françoise Sabban, translated by Edward Schneider.
Chicago, 324 pp., £25.95, September 1998, 0 226 70684 2
Show More
Show More
... off what God might provide in the way of roots, berries and wild herbs, or at most as tending a small garden. The distinction between those who cooked their food and those who ate it raw in the Middle Ages was less likely to mark out the civilised from the savage than the secular from the spiritual. Official withdrawal from the world did not necessarily ...

Lost Property

Andrew O’Hagan, 20 December 2018

... being young, part of the psychopathology of everyday life, then it stopped. Maybe you stop losing small things around the time you start losing big ones – parents, countries, friends – but I haven’t lost a bank card in ten years and I used to lose ten a year. In my twenties, I was forever dropping keys and leaving coats in cloakrooms, or spectacles on ...

Diary

Helen Sullivan: A City of Islands, 1 December 2022

... she had implied.Walking to the centre of Kolonia, Pohnpei’s main town, I passed sleeping dogs, small shops selling snacks, a Unicef office in a shipping container, a post office, a satellite dish as big as the post office, the bright green tourism office with a sign showing the distance from Pohnpei to various cities around the world, and a billboard ...

At Serpentine North

Frances Morgan: ‘Radio Ballads’, 9 June 2022

... their husbands’ overalls.Sagar’s film, along with new commissioned works by Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim, is part of Radio Ballads, a group exhibition which has just come to the end of a run at Serpentine North and Barking Town Hall (in the same square as the new memorial). The Body Blow shares its name with one of the original Radio ...

Helter-Skelter

Edmund Gordon: ‘Melmoth’, 3 January 2019

Melmoth 
by Sarah Perry.
Serpent’s Tail, 271 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 1 78816 065 0
Show More
Show More
... right after, but she was ugly anyway and it didn’t matter.’ In one splendidly unsavoury scene, Helen Franklin, the novel’s clever, unhappy heroine, sits with three other women discussing their greatest ever sin. One of them admits that as a child she routinely stole money from her mother: ‘Helen does not like this ...

Her Proper Duties

Tessa Hadley: Helen Simpson, 5 January 2006

Constitutional 
by Helen Simpson.
Cape, 144 pp., £14.99, December 2005, 0 224 07794 5
Show More
Show More
... the parenting part is more or less over. Since her first collection was published 16 years ago, Helen Simpson’s stories have charted that succession of stages: sex and pregnancy in Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), babies in Dear George (1995), in Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), ‘the squabbly nuclear family unit . . . awful hobbling five-and ...

Hillside Men

Roy Foster: Ernie O’Malley, 16 July 1998

Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual 
by Richard English.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 01 982059 3
Show More
Show More
... From the mid-Twenties, increasingly disillusioned, he travelled in Spain and Italy, subsisting on small handouts from his family and the IRA. But in 1928, he was asked to help raise money in America for de Valera’s new Republican newspaper, the Irish Press. An unlikely fundraiser, O’Malley was not greatly enamoured of the traditional Irish-American ...

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege 
by Joy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3
Show More
Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
by Joy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5
Show More
Show More
... a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Helen’s mother has a terminal illness – no wonder Helen is ‘having a rough time of it’. Mother and daughter alternate between considerateness and bickering, confrontation with what is happening and evasion of it. The ...

At Dulwich

Emily LaBarge: Helen Frankenthaler, 16 December 2021

... Helen​ Frankenthaler is best known for her vivid, large-scale ‘soak-stain’ paintings, which initiated the colour field works of the so-called second generation Abstract Expressionists. She claimed that her visit to Jackson Pollock’s exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 changed her sense of what could be done with colour, space, line and movement – and convinced her of the value of allusiveness over narrative ...

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