Reviews

Like Water and Other Stories - Olga Zilberbourg
I know Olga from my work at Narrative Magazine. She’s one of the most interesting and provocative contemporary writers I know—and her blog on Russian literature is not to be missed: https://zilberbourg.com/. She is also a fellow émigré and writer-mom. I teach her work often on Experimental Practice at University of Salford. Colleagues like this don’t come along every day!

How to be both - Ali Smith
I wrote this review as part of a mock Folio Prize at the Centre for New Writing. I was drafting my thesis on Ali Smith’s The Accidental (along with Jennifer Egan’s, A Visit from the Goon Squad), so it was a real treat to break from that to chime in on the discussion of How to be both. Great book, great writer!

The Whitworth - Idris Khan
I spent about four months in the Whitworth Art Gallery doing yoga in the same room as Khan’s exhibition. Every time I was in the room, I felt haunted by Khan’s images. Growing up I went to a ton of art exhibitions with my stepmother, who is a painter. I never realised until I wrote this piece how shaping our trips to the San Francisco MOMA or the UC-Berkeley Art Gallery or the De Young Museum were. Writing about art felt about two inches away from writing about writing! Thank you, Sandra!

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace
I remember staying up all night to finish this review: the pressure was enormous. As I pressed submit to the Monitor, I saw the ‘competing’ reviews in the Los Angeles Times and other major venues flash across my screen. Still, the risk I took in writing it was so worth the pleasure of being part of this remarkable release of Wallace’s posthumous work across the globe, from the US to the UK (where I now live).

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace - David Lipsky
When I wrote this piece, I had no idea that David and I would become colleagues, when he sought me out on Facebook to thank me for the review. I’d really only written reviews previously on books whose writers who were no longer living (this was intentional); so this one featured a special kind of terror for me as an author (is auteur-terroir a term, maybe one we should coin?). One of the other surprises is that I would later learn that David sent this to the producer of the film made from his book. I was honoured and thrilled!

This Is Water - David Foster Wallace
In retrospect, I think I wrote this review to cope with my writer’s grief about Wallace’s passing. I did not know him and had only just begun to read his work, but I knew a part of him anyway through his and my agent, Bonnie Nadell. It was a huge honour to be able to review this lovely monograph/Kenyon College commemoration address.
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Forging of Self - Dennison’s Luisa Domic
My first review came out in Puckerbrush Review. Puckerbrush Press was founded by my former tutor/poet Constance Hunting, at UMaine Orono, where I studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Connie was wonderful, as was the host of poets that came to read, no doubt because the National Poetry Foundation was founded there. I heard Carolyn Forché, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, amongst others, whilst I was there. Thrilling