This is the desired effect! 🙏

The cover. Title in white shaky handwriting on black background, above a red and white illustration of letters cut up and jumbled around (Post Dogmatist Painting #934 [2017] by Cecil Touchan).

REAL ESTATE My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, if you don't stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter Motherfucker under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. That man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after the funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn't prove it, I couldn't get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn't haunted, it's owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.

Grateful to @chrispower.bsky.social for reviewing Richard Siken's extraordinary book of post-stroke prose poems, I Do Know Some Things, which prompted me to buy it.

This week’s review, in which John Cornwell tells Ted Hughes to “please fuck off” observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Paperback of the week: Offenses by Constance Debré This grim tale of murder finds the former defence lawyer aligning herself with Paris’s banlieue-dwelling underclass

Constance Debré takes the focus off herself, with interestingly mixed results observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Paperback of the week: Offenses by Constance Debré This grim tale of murder finds the former defence lawyer aligning herself with Paris’s banlieue-dwelling underclass

Constance Debré takes the focus off herself, with interestingly mixed results observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Transcription by Ben Lerner — the contested ground between fact and fiction The US novelist probes the porous border between the real and the unreal in this thrilling hall of mirrors

I wrote about Ben Lerner’s simultaneously dense and nimble new book for the @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/db58...

Transcription by Ben Lerner — the contested ground between fact and fiction The US novelist probes the porous border between the real and the unreal in this thrilling hall of mirrors

I wrote about Ben Lerner’s simultaneously dense and nimble new book for the @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/db58...

Paperback of the week: I Do Know Some Things by Richard S... A viral sensation with his debut poetry collection, Siken was later incapacitated by a stroke – necessitating a whole new way of expressing himself

Richard Siken’s new collection - written in recovery from and response to a stroke - is extraordinary observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Ha ha well I’d consider myself to have had quite a blessed reading life if The Maniac was the worst of it. Orengo doesn’t spend much time on Spandau beyond the practicalities of his writing on sheets of toilet paper (perhaps a link there to your opinion of Labatut’s novel).

Paperback of the week: You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Lo... The French author attempts to use fiction to demystify the life of Hitler’s architect and confidant Albert Speer

I wrote about Albert Speer & Gitta Sereny via Jean-Noël Orengo’s You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Paperback of the week: You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Lo... The French author attempts to use fiction to demystify the life of Hitler’s architect and confidant Albert Speer

I wrote about Albert Speer & Gitta Sereny via Jean-Noël Orengo’s You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Paperback of the week: Overnight by Dan Richards Whether braving gales on a night ferry or joining early risers at a bakery, Richards’ engaging book illuminates the nocturnal workings of the nation

This week’s paperback review observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Fantastic piece

31 years before Thomas Mann began The Magic Mountain in Davos, Robert Louis Stevenson finished Treasure Island there.

Paperback of the week: Women Without Men by Shahrnush Par... Banned in Iran, Parsipur’s novel about a makeshift family of women is timely and human – and revels in the unexpected

‘The women in this novel are without men because they have outlived them, or been spurned by them, pushed them down the stairs, or, in the case of a sex worker, simply quit her job.’

observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Paperback of the week: Monet by Jackie Wullschläger This biography paints a compelling portrait of the artist from poverty to riches in life – and neglect to reverence in death

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

No we’re aligned. Although I don’t find the print in mine too small. But jeez it’s hideous.

Karl Ove Knausgård, Glenn Kotche & Johan Renck: Historia | Barbican An joyous evening of words and sound that celebrates craft and friendship with writer Karl Ove Knausgård, musician Glenn Kotche and director Johan Renck, with a Q&A by literary critic Chris Power.

Do London people know about this on Thursday? Sounds amazing @chrispower.bsky.social

www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202...

Often distressingly in my sightline, that edition

Front Row - Review: Tracey Emin: A Second Life at Tate Modern - BBC Sounds Plus the rave-thriller film Sirât and George Eliot's origin story on stage in Bird Grove.

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...

Chris Power · That’s a body: On Cristina Rivera Garza Despite her novel’s conventional set-up, Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract....

‘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...

‘His shoes and clothes wore thin; he was so tired that, strolling down the street smoking, he did not notice that he had set his jacket on fire with his pipe.’

Chris Power · That’s a body: On Cristina Rivera Garza Despite her novel’s conventional set-up, Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract....

‘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.

Chris Power · That’s a body: On Cristina Rivera Garza Despite her novel’s conventional set-up, Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract....

‘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...

Thanks Cory! I really enjoyed thinking and writing about the book. Reading it was another matter.

Chris Power · That’s a body: On Cristina Rivera Garza Despite her novel’s conventional set-up, Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract....

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...