WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Poetics of Work
Mordant reflections on a France veering rightwards
FORMIDABLE INTELLIGENCE: Noemi Lefebvre
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
SET against the backdrop of rising nationalism and police brutality in France, this little firecracker of a book from Noemi Lefebvre is part discourse, part philosophical meditation and Beckettian stream of consciousness.
It’s set somewhere in Lyon, where an unnamed poet spliffs their tortured way through the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks.
Through an ongoing inner dialogue with a superego father, who was “sitting in his study in the right side of my brain, he was leafing through 4x4 Magazine,” the narrator filters cogent questions of selfhood from within the machinery of capitalism in what’s an elegant little genre-buster riffing on philosophies of language, being and poetry in short, crackling fragments.
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FIONA O'CONNOR recommends a biography that is a beautiful achievement and could stand as a manifesto for the power of subtlety in art
FIONA O’CONNOR is fascinated by a novel written from the perspective of a neurodivergent psychology student who falls in love
FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
