MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
READING the Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos's latest book I Don't Expect Anyone To Believe Me (And Other Stories, £11.99) is like entering into a fantastical world so powerful and mesmerising that its almost impossible to leave it.
Masterly translated by Daniel Hahn and a well-deserved winner of the prestigious Herralde Prize, the novel is as witty and entertaining as it is thought-provoking. It involves the story of desperate immigrants, literature students and violent gangsters in contemporary Barcelona. But it’s much more than that.
Villalobos is highly successful in conveying a world where endemic corruption, organised crime, state violence, the dividing line between fiction and reality and the limits of humour in literature get crazier as the story progresses.
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
HENRY BELL welcomes a fine demonstration of the need to love the words themselves in the communication of political messages
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin



