Such a great biography. Why can’t they all be this good? observer.co.uk/culture/book...

“What a coarse, immoral, mean and senseless work Hamlet is.” - Tolstoy

Do London people know about this on Thursday? Sounds amazing @chrispower.bsky.social www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202...

Feel free to review me reviewing Emin/Sirāt/Bird Grove www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

A couple of extracts from my @theobserveruk.bsky.social review of Eduardo Halfon’s excellent novel Tarantula. Modiano-heads take note. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

A couple of extracts from my @theobserveruk.bsky.social review of Eduardo Halfon’s excellent novel Tarantula. Modiano-heads take note. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

‘The novel denies us solution, catharsis and, for much of its length, comprehension. Yet this is what it must be like for Cristina Rivera Garza, to whom, I suspect, all crime novels are unjustifiably cosy.’ @chrispower.bsky.social reads ‘Death Takes Me’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘He stirred himself to go later in August, but the painting sessions were held up initially by rain, then by a minor accident when Monet injured his leg protecting some children in the forest from a discus thrown by English tourists.’ I could do with a little more detail here.

‘Despite the conventional set-up, Cristina Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract. Satisfaction is antithetical to her aims. 𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘴 𝘔𝘦 is a book designed to withhold the pleasures of the genre.’ @chrispower.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘He stirred himself to go later in August, but the painting sessions were held up initially by rain, then by a minor accident when Monet injured his leg protecting some children in the forest from a discus thrown by English tourists.’ I could do with a little more detail here.

‘The novel denies us solution, catharsis and, for much of its length, comprehension. Yet this is what it must be like for Cristina Rivera Garza, to whom, I suspect, all crime novels are unjustifiably cosy.’ @chrispower.bsky.social reads ‘Death Takes Me’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I’m in this week’s @lrb.co.uk writing about a novel I struggled through twice and am still in large part baffled by www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"Manchette wastes none of his readers’ time, one short chapter after another driving the book relentlessly to its end." @chrispower.bsky.social on Jean-Patrick Machette's Nada. If you like Manchette we recommend you check out Jean Echenoz.

Not a million miles off, Mr Dickens.

All anarcho-Marxist killer, no filler. A fantastic novel. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

I spent a couple of hours walking around the Prado with Mathias Énard observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Rosenberg, the son of Holocaust survivors, believed in the Zionist project until a visit to Israel in the late 1960s revealed “a land filled with violence, injustice, and hatred”. His book, & its account of how Israel’s apartheid system operates, is essential reading. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Fonts in conversation. A new series (probably 1 of 1).

Brilliant work @ianleslie.bsky.social

Maybe the greatest ever example of nominative determinism

From the Sunday Times, Nov 8th 1987. What became of Motion’s ten-novel sequence?

Kenneth Roth looks back at 30 years of genocide, repression and state-sponsored terror. And you know what? It almost looks like a golden age compared with today. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: another lost classic plucked from oblivion’s clutches you’re welcome observer.co.uk/culture/book...

November again already?

"Williams is my platonic ideal of a writer." Very good review (unbylined but I presume by @chrispower.bsky.social) of Joy Willams's new collection of stories, The Pelican Child.

My last review of the year is this very enjoyable study of The Magic Mountain, a novel I read during a month in hospital. When a doc asked “What’s the book about?” I said, “Among other things death, disease, & the seductions of illness”. He looked utterly appalled www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

Coetzee on Dostoevsky’s compositional method

I like the way Mann and Dostoevsky hold the reader by the hand at the end of the authors’ notes to The Magic Mountain and Brothers Karamazov

Halfway through. Not ‘no notes’. In fact many notes, but they’re all like, ‘Holy shit!’ and ‘So good!!’ and ‘Sick!!!’

@chrispower.bsky.social wrote a bittersweet review of Soraya Antonius's The Lord: a rich picture of Mandatory Palestine, its independence movement, the consequences and follies of empire, and the unfortunate circular nature of history. It's worth reading.

This week a 600-page internet novel that was previously only available, back in 2006, as a PDF purchase from Helen DeWitt’s blog observer.co.uk/culture/book...

I respect this arriving 79 pages into Hayman’s biography of Thomas Mann

In this week’s @theobserveruk.bsky.social, I wrote about the case for the abolition of death observer.co.uk/culture/book...

The first month of my paperback of the week column in @theobserveruk.bsky.social looked like this. Coming up in December: a neuroscientist abolishes death, a 20-year-old internet novel, and colonial crimes in Palestine.

I interviewed Karl Ove Knausgård for @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

So glad she/he/they got a credit on this

“Are you a special agent sent here to ruin my evening and possibly my entire life?”

Godrevy Lighthouse of To the Lighthouse fame (I know Woolf transplanted it to Scotland don’t @ me)

My review of the third part of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume - one of the most exciting things happening in fiction right now observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Absolutely not thank you

“Did I always understand where I was and what was happening? No. Did I care? Almost never. The power and surprise of the writing is so great that confusion rarely translates into frustration.” Spot on review of Cǎrtǎrescu’s weird and seductive book:

Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu. An incredible Proustian, Schulzian book! Also very happy to bring the existence of Magnus Puke to a wider audience observer.co.uk/culture/book...

I’ve always been suspicious of the neatness of some essayists’ lives, almost as if… they’re making it up. Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days refuses to plane off the rough edges of her experiences, even if that makes them ungainly and difficult to present in a book. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Every Sunday I’ll be contributing a paperback column to the Observer’s New Review. Kicking things off is Driver by Mattia Filice (@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social), who’s poured his experience of 2 decades working on the French rail network into an extraordinary verse novel. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

My 2025

‘but it’s not what you’re supposed to do with a corpse’. Fantastic Stellan Skarsgård: www.vulture.com/article/stel...

Loved my conversation with Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk last night. Death and the Gardener is a beautiful novel

Letter signed, ‘Please accept. Sincerely, Samuel Beckett.’

Perfect!