NEW POST: on Natasha Brown's 'Universality' lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/w...

NEW POST: on Natasha Brown's 'Universality' lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/w...

'Perspectives' by Laurent Binet: a clever, playful historical thriller mixing art and politics in C16 Florence - complete with an Assassin's Creed reference and a Renaissance bullet-time moment. What's not to like?

'Sick Houses' by Leila Taylor: a fascinating exploration of the real and imagined domestic architecture of horror, both serious about the cultural politics of the genre and joyfully enthusiastic about its pleasures

I've written about grief and labour in Spiritfarer, via Judith Butler, for this month's issue of @unwinnable.com

New blog post: on Holly Pester's fantastic novel 'The Lodgers', published by @grantabooks.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/w...

New blog post: on Holly Pester's fantastic novel 'The Lodgers', published by @grantabooks.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/w...

A fantastic piece about the importance of a meaningful death and how labor ties into Spiritfarer's message of grief. I love this game so much, and @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social has articulated one of the biggest reasons why here.

'I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There' by @roisinlanigan.bsky.social: a bit of millennial gothic, mixing classic haunted house tropes with Gails and Fleabag references. Finely poised between realism and horror, a compelling invocation of the cursedness of the contemporary housing situation.

"[I]n Stella’s work as Spritfarer, labor is reclaimed and redirected toward the ends of care and the creation of grievable life." Feature Excerpt: @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social applies Judith Butler's theories on grief to Spiritfarer:

'The City Changes its Face' by Eimear McBride: revisits the setup of 'The Lesser Bohemians' in a remarkable novel about language and art as the interface between private darkness and shared/public experience, with McBride's sentence-level experiments matched by subtle structural intricacy.

Indika is very bizarre and extremely Russian - the theological themes are fine, but its real richness comes from the extraordinary environmental design and a thorough immersion in the absurdist tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov etc.

'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware: deftly refracts a history of postwar progressive reconstruction, its internal tensions, and its eventual undoing through a singular and well-crafted voice whose (sometimes gleefully) compromised position saves the novel from over-earnest didacticism

I've written about grief and labour in Spiritfarer, via Judith Butler, for this month's issue of @unwinnable.com

'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey: a slim and sparse reflection on the numinous experience of a planetary view, albeit tempered with insistent consciousness of climate breakdown. Attempts the important work of re-enchantment in an age of Starlink and spiralling ecological disaster.

'Confessions' by Catherine Airey: a big transatlantic multi-generational novel that takes on some hefty themes. The plotting is a bit over-neat, with one coincidence that stretches credulity, but overall it's well structured, precisely written and deftly handled.

I knew I shouldn’t have used that @!*$# AI!

NEW POST on Rachel Cusk's 'Parade': a new formal experiment, moving beyond autofiction towards the limits of the novel. lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/w...

NEW POST on Rachel Cusk's 'Parade': a new formal experiment, moving beyond autofiction towards the limits of the novel. lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/w...

NEW POST on Mary Morrissy's excellent novel 'Penelope Unbound' from @bansheepress.bsky.social, a vibrant reimagining of the life of Norah Joyce lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/27/s...

NEW POST on Mary Morrissy's excellent novel 'Penelope Unbound' from @bansheepress.bsky.social, a vibrant reimagining of the life of Norah Joyce lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/27/s...

'Bad Taste' by @nrolah.bsky.social: a trenchant critique of the dominant aesthetics of contemporary everyday life and how they express and reiterate modes of class power. Both sharp and vivid, ranging effortlessly across cultural forms

'The Lodgers' by Holly Pester: a very funny, slightly strange, formally interesting take on precarious housing and its distinctive psychological effects. Tinted with sadness, but focused on the necessary cultural work - and literary possibilities - of imagination and empathy

For the new year, I've started a new blog for writing on recent fiction (and perhaps other things, eventually) - starting with last year's 'Mother Naked' by @glenjamesbrown.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/m...

Capitalism: A Horror Story by @thelitcritguy.bsky.social: a lively and passionate call for a Gothic sensibility as 'romantic anticapitalism' - we need more writing that takes the radical potential in popular culture this seriously

This is the most wonderful, considered - and insightful - discussion of my book I've ever read. Thank you @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social I'm humbled and awed.

The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova: a darkly satirical lens on contemporary Englishness, with a strong dose of body horror. One or two of these didn't do that much for me, but at their best they're brilliantly weird bits of very black satire, well worth checking out.

For the new year, I've started a new blog for writing on recent fiction (and perhaps other things, eventually) - starting with last year's 'Mother Naked' by @glenjamesbrown.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/m...

Mary Morrissy, ‘Penelope Unbound’: an excellent novel that reimagines the life of Norah Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife, on the premise that the two split apart after arriving in Trieste in 1904.

Lauren Oyler, 'No Judgement: On Being Critical': not really criticism, or about criticism per se, but explores how acts of interpretation and evaluation are embedded in a larger cultural and media landscape

Sarah Bernstein, 'Study for Obedience': a disarming combination of the specific and the strange, pitting the freight of Jewish history, the networks of international capital, and the gender politics of care against something blurrier...

So 'The Geographies of David Foster Wallace's Novels' is now available to pre-order in paperback from Edinburgh University Press, if anyone thinks they might be interested edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-geo....