IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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Delicious literary journalism
JAN WOOLF savours the essays of Hilary Mantel: high calorific brain food that slips down nicely
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High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
New releases from The Tenementals, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin, and Kuunatic
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
ALEX HALL is intrigued by a detailed history of Gaza that demonstrates its historic resilience and changing economy
A Memoir of my Former Self
Hilary Mantel
John Murray, £25
A MEMOIR of my Former Self, or “Messages from people I used to be” is a selection of journalism from one of our finest writers.
Harvested by her long-time editor Nicholas Pearson and published a year after her death last year, the range is 2007-2017. The book is divided into sections – essays, film reviews (from her time at The Spectator), Reith Lectures and an enticingly named collection called The Moon Was a Tender Crescent. Although journalism they read as literature, with the writer in an artist’s resonance with her subject; whether another writer, the past or the act of writing itself. Ink is a generative fluid.
Not academic, yet academically impeccable, she often defies the litocracy of the creative writing industry. In terms of “showing, and not telling” she demonstrates what needs showing, and what telling, and how these styles of writing form the aesthetic balance of a book, much like cold and warm colours do in painting or tapestry.
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