Search Results

“... It is hard now to recover the thrill of underground discovery, the hand-to-hand ardour, the feeling of claim engendered by A Hundred Years of Solitude. But Love in the Time of Cholera, like Autumn of the Patriarch before it, gives us something altogether new. With gorgeous, lucent writing, full of brilliant stops and starts, majestic whirls, thrilling endings, splendour and humour, the magician of our century takes on psychological realism ...”

“... literary weightiness, but this creates formal problems for both writers. Although by the end of Mona Simpson’s novel we are in no doubt as to the seriousness of her themes or her genuine gift for plot, a huge amount of the surface texture of her book is taken up with the kind of homespun detail and domestic minutiae which we associate with the ...”

“... Mona Simpson’s novels are long and loose, and make compulsive reading. She not only writes about obsession, but she passes on the effect with extraordinary directness, almost as though there’s no separate authorial presence in her books at all – art concealing art with a vengeance. A Regular Guy is her third novel, and in it she celebrates her first ten years in the business by surrendering her addiction to ‘I’, and edging just a little further over into fictionality with the invention of self-made hero Tom Owens, the multi-millionaire founder of a West Coast biotech company he christens ‘Genesis’: ‘He thought of himself as a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom ...”

“... been left on and that you don’t want to watch’. Hayden’s story reads like the beginning of a Mona Simpson novel: ‘A week after my mother’s body was cremated, my father borrowed an Ecoline van from someone and piled us into it,’ she writes. ‘We sat in cheap beach chairs in the back drinking beer, which spilled off when he took the corners too ...”

“... Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but here might seem in one respect a common sort of first novel: it is a book about an intelligent child growing up with a troublesome parent. In fact, though, it is evident almost from the beginning that this is a book which does not aim merely to tell a personal story well. One senses the ambitiousness of this book, a wish to matter, to take an interesting part in the ongoing conversation of American Literature, and this is exhilarating ...”

“... is power and who has it over whom. At the time of its construction, the Eiffel Tower, according to Mona Ozouf, was taken by some as a symbol of the Revolution, by others as an insult to God, by others still as plain ugly. With the passage of time it became an important resource against invading armies (when used as a radio and signalling station) and finally ...”

“... Golub, Alfredo Jaar, On Kawara, Glenn Ligon, Shirin Neshat, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper and Lorna Simpson, all of whom are widely recognised and esteemed. A smaller number are based on the West Coast, including Allan Sekula and Raymond Pettibon in California, together with Stan Douglas, Ken Lum and Jeff Wall, all born and based in Vancouver. London fared ...”