STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
Latest editorial
Poetics of Work
Mordant reflections on a France veering rightwards
FORMIDABLE INTELLIGENCE: Noemi Lefebvre
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
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.
Similar stories
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
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
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