kevin davey

Buying too many books at the Small Publishers Fair at Conway Hall @smallpublishers.bsky.social

1921

1921

for some reason Alfred Jarry crossed my mind when I saw Morland’s cartoon in today’s Times

a really impressive account of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s development politically and as a poet, the watershed of 1981 and the importance of John la Rose and New Beacon - though it really should have made more of Race Today, Railton Road, CLR James and Darcus Howe… but it’s a keeper of a piece

a really impressive account of LKJ’s development politically and as a poet, and the watershed of 1981 and the importance of John la Rose and New Beacon - tho should have made more of Race Today, Railton Road, CLR James and Darcus Howe… but it’s an impressive keeper of a piece

A seriously impressive review in the LRB which hasn’t sent me to the title, but headfirst back into the 73 hours of David Lynch’s ten movies and three series of Twin Peaks. I know Godard didn’t like him but Godard wasn’t always on point. The soundtracks are almost as good as JLG’s.

hmm. An accurate description, maybe. But would ethnic coding of bylines be something you’d approve of?

My thoughts on the remarkable fiction of Paul Griffiths in the latest issue of Exacting Clam

www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-18...

No longer Manga and Murakami. Prospect surveys the boom in fiction translated from Japanese. I guess I should take a look at Murata

Thinking, as always, I should read at least one I worked my way down the list. And then went back to the top. And then a second time also…

Thinking I should read at least one I worked through the list. And then started again….

thanks Rónán! appreciated

Many thanks! to Rónán Hession for his appreciation of TOOTHPULL in the Irish Times this weekend

I can’t help but read the latest Maggie Nelson as a flipside to Toothpull, my recent memoir of a troubled dentist. Pathemata, dis-Latined, is a Book of Suffering. Death is in the air. It’s a COVID era narrative. “Pain pretends urgency” she says, “one has to become cold-hearted to its entreaties.”

as i think (in fact hope) you aren’t likely to be readers of the remote right monthly The Critic,
here’s a kiss and tell feature you might otherwise miss - an author’s step by step account of the collapse of Unbound

I’m impressed and also disappointed that the centre right/FT appears to understand the contested and intricate links between literary form, imagination and politics better than the left.

Thank-you Will Davies for reviewing Toothpull of St Dunstan - the memoir of a Canterbury dentist tugging and plugging at the gate to the city for 700 years - in today’s Times Literary Supplement.

and before long the cold microbes will evolve AI swarms of nanobot jamming phlegm

👍

A 700 year old dentist. This is a fantastic book. Ambitious idea, dazzling at the sentence level, entertaining in-between. If there's a type of novel you love that you think people "don't publish anymore," it's probably this one.

For readers of #AlanMoore and #modernism. Let's call it Mooredernism

OutCalvino-ing Calvino in ‘89! This and The Lay of Sir Tristram - and the musicological expertise of Griffiths’ work on the Second Viennese and Darmstadt schools - are the seedbed for the revoiced Ophelias of LET ME TELL YOU and LET ME GO ON, now combined by NYRB. Republish the backlist, someone.

he certainly is / I’m reading (and recommend) part 3 of Joseph Koerner’s latest, ART IN A STATE OF SIEGE, on how Kentridge has shored up hope, image-making and truth-telling in South Africa

“Literature is becoming culturally marginal”; “the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking”; its “prestige has declined precipitously.” This week’s New Statesman includes a lamentable Jeremiad by James Marriott, name-checking no writers after Trilling and Auden. Though he does have a point.

Philip Hensher self-puffs his forthcoming history of the novel in this week’s Spectator, trashing Eimear McBride as he goes. Not a volume I’ll be pre-ordering.

oh f&”k! / just when one had already thought the worst

bsky.app/profile/kvin...