GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Letters from Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Argentinean Natalia Casali, poetry by Salvadoran-American Janel Pineda and Colombian Maria Paz Guerrero and an essay by Puerto Rican Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
“THE WAR never happened but somehow you and I/still exist. Like obsidian,/we know only the memory of lava/and not the explosion that created/us.”
In these opening verses of Lineage of Rain (Haymarket Books, £7.99), Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda begins her mesmerising story, one of Salvadoran migration, diaspora and the US-sponsored civil war that fuses the personal with the communal and the political with everyday life.
Each poem in this powerful pamphlet sings its own beautiful tune, taking the reader on a journey of discoveries and redemption, from El Salvador to Los Angeles and back. There are moving family narratives where women take centre stage, as in Rain, where the grandmother Tana passes down stories and memories to her granddaughter.
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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
Heart Lamp by the Indian writer Banu Mushtaq and winner of the 2025 International Booker prize is a powerful collection of stories inspired by the real suffering of women, writes HELEN VASSALLO
LEO BOIX introduces a bold novel by Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo, a raw memoir from Cuban-Russian author Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and powerful poetry by Mexican Juana Adcock