Disappearing Writer
This morning I read an AI-generated review of my own writing. It was of an academic article[1] from 2010, about the photomontage artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). The notification and link came from academia.edu, a...
Deaf Republic: Book Review
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, London: Faber and Faber, 2019. You might wonder, as I did, whether I was reading a fable, a myth, a folktale, a parable, or something else, something different. Of course...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...
The Spell of the Sensuous: Book Review
This book seems like “mine,” in a sense few ever turn out to be. That’s because it recognizes the difference between spoken and written language. It’s a subject of very long-term interest to me....
The Years: Book Review
It’s as if I’ve just read my own biography. I haven’t, of course: The Years is clearly ordered and clearly labelled as Ernaux’s autobiography, or memoire, from the date of her birth in 1941...
The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story. Book Review
I finished reading a few days ago, and can still feel my admiration building. In many ways traditional in structure, it is a tale of a character transformation, from the point a young man...