Essayism Review: Towards a Definition
Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017 I’ll start with the conclusion so there’s no chance of wandering off and reaching a different one: the book led me to understand “essayism” to be...
Category: writing
The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
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...
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 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...