The Republic of Consciousness Prize for innovative fiction; and the best-written recent releases in speculative fiction and nonfiction
Plus Simon Crithley answers our questions on style (video)
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Simon Critchley answers our questions on style, and the existence (or otherwise) of the self
.
Last month we chose Critchley’s On Mysticism as one of the best-written recent releases.
There was a strange asceticism to the world of isolation and disease experienced by these people, which opened them up to extreme experiences of doubt, dereliction, dreams, hypochondria, and hallucination. Many of them felt a desperate desire for the touch of love, for a connection with something or someone outside or larger than the self, however that might be understood, possibly even as something divine.
Read the book’s opening pages here.
PAYWALL REMOVED TODAY
The Republic of Consciousness Prize for innovative fiction: the best-written work on the shortlist
The winner will be announced on the 1st of April.
They ran wild in packs. They spread disease. They fouled the pavements. They kept us awake and then infected our dreams. They bred faster than rabbits. They laughed at the police. Whole districts became no-go areas. Finally the government took action: they were rounded up and slaughtered and buried in pits and now there are no dogs.
The travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs - but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city.
‘Funny, sinister, thought-moving like light, subtly then increasingly terrifying. Its intelligence reads like relief. Its determination not to language- or life-launder leaves it and the experience of reading it clean and cleansing re the shining and the very dark and the strangeness of us.’
– Ali Smith
The shortlist and an extract from our pick are here.
A good number of books enthused about by mainstream reviewers and nominated for major literary prizes contain prose that at best isn’t very impressive, and at worst could conceivably have been written by AI. Books like this shouldn’t receive nominations for important prizes or appear on prestigious year-end lists and the like, we believe, no matter how accomplished or original their ideas, stories, or characters.
Read the criteria for our picks.
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COMING SOON
—I’ll be joing Eleanor Anstruther on Tuesday the 1st at noon GMT, as part of her superb series 8 Questions.
—A.L. Kennedy, Malachy Tallack, Jonathan Meades, and more of the world’s best writers answer our questions on style.
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Our first pick from the recent releases in nonfiction
True, heterosexual readers don’t like encountering cocks and balls, but they are mercifully absent in James and Conrad…
'A pointillistic canvas of gay desire and male sexuality in its many paradoxes and contradictions' RALF WEBB, GUARDIAN
'The gayest book ever written' HENRY HOKE, author of Open Throat
'Intelligent, stylish, entertaining and funny' TLS
The other books considered and an extract from our pick are here.
RECOMMENDED
Weatherglass Books: Words in Progress: AI has some way to go or David Beckham is infinitely more intelligent than me
Burning Shore: God is a Fiery Accelerant
It’s Monday: Drawings by Nancy: Repair and maintenance
Matthew Karamazov’s The Reading Life
Our pick from the recent releases in speculative fiction
Their early start gave the rest of the day a hard-eyed, crack-of-dawn feeling that persisted even after noon had come and gone; and the monotony of the long drive, mostly on nondescript freeways, made time both stand still and spool on endlessly, its passing marked only by the hardening of their butts, the locking of their lower backs.