Results for 'rachel cusk'

1. Deborah Levy

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

Wonderfully entertaining . . . a witty scherzo of a “fiction” . . . We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong

1. Han Kang

Light and Thread

The prolific South Korean author is back with her first book since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2025. In Light and Thread, Kang recalls a poem she wrote at eight years old in which she imagined that “gold thread” of connection, language. Here she uses that thread to tie together essays and poems, her life and her work, beginning with “Nobel lecture” in which the author discusses her writing process and the myriad questions that drive her work

1. Ali Smith

Glyph

Glyph’s primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference . . . Smith’s tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with . . . bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity . . . It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away. There is also something about Smith’s relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task . . . Smith’s sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable

1. Catherine Lacey

The Möbius Book

A genre-bending story about breaking - both of the heart and literary form itself - from the critically-acclaimed author of Biography of X.

1. Deborah Levy

August Blue

Intelligent and absurd, precise and dream-like . . . I know of few other authors who can capture an atmosphere of the eerie and the bizarre as well as she does

1. Arnaud Schmitt

Rachel Cusk's Life Writing