Search Results

“... I don’t know which pronunciation either but will trust an advert that chooses semicolons over em dashes, little Basil Bunting beards in favour of shattered thistledown’s propellers. Language as capillary action rising through a sugar cube, growing heavy, placed on the tongue – this is easier to explain in pidgin pillowtalk, the link between grammar, glamour, grimoire, mammoth (adj ...”

“... Before​ I embarked on Eley Williams, of whom I had read nothing and knew nothing, I flipped through Attrib., her first book of stories. Even on first flip, I got a sense of something I sometimes find in things I like and that seem good to me, something that subliminally distinguishes writing that is careful and alive: a kind of alphabetical justice, to give this sheepish and probably disreputable thing a name in public ...”

“... Where you have​ a girl and a looking-glass, or – in the case of one of Eley Williams’s short stories – a woman who sees her reflection in the automated glass doors of an office building that one morning won’t open for her, the ghost of Lewis Carroll is never far away. In her perplexed despair at being unable to enter her workplace, the narrator turns around and sees another woman through the window of a seafood restaurant, and this woman is waving ...”

“... A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley Williams, all published by independent presses, started to attract attention, and there was a flurry of excitement about writing that departed in some way from the conventions of realism which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory ...”