Laurie McRae Andrew

Words are your weapons: Natasha Brown, ‘Universality’ How are the relationships between power and discourse formed in contemporary British journalism and (what passes for) public debate? In what ways do class, race and economics interact with conventi…

NEW POST: on Natasha Brown's 'Universality'

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/w...

Words are your weapons: Natasha Brown, ‘Universality’ How are the relationships between power and discourse formed in contemporary British journalism and (what passes for) public debate? In what ways do class, race and economics interact with conventi…

NEW POST: on Natasha Brown's 'Universality'

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/w...

'Perspectives' by Laurent Binet: a clever, playful historical thriller mixing art and politics in C16 Florence - complete with an Assassin's Creed reference and a Renaissance bullet-time moment. What's not to like?

'Sick Houses' by Leila Taylor: a fascinating exploration of the real and imagined domestic architecture of horror, both serious about the cultural politics of the genre and joyfully enthusiastic about its pleasures

I've written about grief and labour in Spiritfarer, via Judith Butler, for this month's issue of @unwinnable.com

What had I arrived at?: Holly Pester’s ‘The Lodgers’ It’s not particularly surprising that housing has been a prominent concern in fiction of the last decade or so. On a general level, the experience of domestic precarity, enfolded in a larger discou…

New blog post: on Holly Pester's fantastic novel 'The Lodgers', published by @grantabooks.bsky.social
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/w...

What had I arrived at?: Holly Pester’s ‘The Lodgers’ It’s not particularly surprising that housing has been a prominent concern in fiction of the last decade or so. On a general level, the experience of domestic precarity, enfolded in a larger discou…

New blog post: on Holly Pester's fantastic novel 'The Lodgers', published by @grantabooks.bsky.social
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/w...

Thanks for checking it out!

A fantastic piece about the importance of a meaningful death and how labor ties into Spiritfarer's message of grief. I love this game so much, and @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social has articulated one of the biggest reasons why here.

'I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There' by @roisinlanigan.bsky.social: a bit of millennial gothic, mixing classic haunted house tropes with Gails and Fleabag references. Finely poised between realism and horror, a compelling invocation of the cursedness of the contemporary housing situation.

Spritfarer and the Labor of Grief - Unwinnable Judith Butler helps us see how Spiritfarer’s gameplay mechanics connect labor with the politics of grief.

"[I]n Stella’s work as Spritfarer, labor is reclaimed and redirected toward the ends of care and the creation of grievable life."

Feature Excerpt: @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social applies Judith Butler's theories on grief to Spiritfarer:

The cover of 'The City Changes Its Face' by Eimear McBride: a cropped photograph showing a young woman lying on a sofa with a lit cigarette in her hand.

'The City Changes its Face' by Eimear McBride: revisits the setup of 'The Lesser Bohemians' in a remarkable novel about language and art as the interface between private darkness and shared/public experience, with McBride's sentence-level experiments matched by subtle structural intricacy.

A man in military uniform is impaled on a spike with blood around his mouth. A subtitle reads 'His Nobleness has decided to listen to "The Visitation" one last time'.

The main character, a nun in a wimple, dwarfed by enormous stacks of paper and looking up at some mechanical rails high in the distance.

The main character, a nun in a wimple, looks at a gigantic fish suspended from the ceiling.

A first-person view of a mirror in which the character's reflection is replaced by the devil.

Indika is very bizarre and extremely Russian - the theological themes are fine, but its real richness comes from the extraordinary environmental design and a thorough immersion in the absurdist tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov etc.

The cover of 'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware, showing high-rise blocks of flats and a chain-link fence against a pink background.

'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware: deftly refracts a history of postwar progressive reconstruction, its internal tensions, and its eventual undoing through a singular and well-crafted voice whose (sometimes gleefully) compromised position saves the novel from over-earnest didacticism

I've written about grief and labour in Spiritfarer, via Judith Butler, for this month's issue of @unwinnable.com

'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey: a slim and sparse reflection on the numinous experience of a planetary view, albeit tempered with insistent consciousness of climate breakdown. Attempts the important work of re-enchantment in an age of Starlink and spiralling ecological disaster.

The cover of 'Confessions' by Catherine Airey: a photograph of a young woman on a city street holding a small kitten.

'Confessions' by Catherine Airey: a big transatlantic multi-generational novel that takes on some hefty themes. The plotting is a bit over-neat, with one coincidence that stretches credulity, but overall it's well structured, precisely written and deftly handled.

I knew I shouldn’t have used that @!*$# AI!

Writing upside down: Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’ G is a painter whose career is revitalised when he starts to paint upside down. G is a sculptor of woven spider-like forms whose first major retrospective is disrupted when a man throws himself to …

NEW POST on Rachel Cusk's 'Parade': a new formal experiment, moving beyond autofiction towards the limits of the novel.
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/w...

Writing upside down: Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’ G is a painter whose career is revitalised when he starts to paint upside down. G is a sculptor of woven spider-like forms whose first major retrospective is disrupted when a man throws himself to …

NEW POST on Rachel Cusk's 'Parade': a new formal experiment, moving beyond autofiction towards the limits of the novel.
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/w...

‘See Norah’: Mary Morrissy’s ‘Penelope Unbound’ In October 1904, Nora Barnacle arrived in Trieste with her partner, James Joyce. The couple had come to the city on the promise of work for Joyce at the city’s Berlitz School, and he left her to wa…

NEW POST on Mary Morrissy's excellent novel 'Penelope Unbound' from @bansheepress.bsky.social, a vibrant reimagining of the life of Norah Joyce
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/27/s...

‘See Norah’: Mary Morrissy’s ‘Penelope Unbound’ In October 1904, Nora Barnacle arrived in Trieste with her partner, James Joyce. The couple had come to the city on the promise of work for Joyce at the city’s Berlitz School, and he left her to wa…

NEW POST on Mary Morrissy's excellent novel 'Penelope Unbound' from @bansheepress.bsky.social, a vibrant reimagining of the life of Norah Joyce
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/27/s...

'Bad Taste' by @nrolah.bsky.social: a trenchant critique of the dominant aesthetics of contemporary everyday life and how they express and reiterate modes of class power. Both sharp and vivid, ranging effortlessly across cultural forms

'The Lodgers' by Holly Pester: a very funny, slightly strange, formally interesting take on precarious housing and its distinctive psychological effects. Tinted with sadness, but focused on the necessary cultural work - and literary possibilities - of imagination and empathy

Mother Naked by Glen James Brown Glen James Brown’s second novel takes its cue from a minor fragment of recorded history: an entry in the ledger of the Bursar of Durham Priory that records the lowest-paid entertainer ever employed…

For the new year, I've started a new blog for writing on recent fiction (and perhaps other things, eventually) - starting with last year's 'Mother Naked' by @glenjamesbrown.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/m...

Capitalism: A Horror Story by @thelitcritguy.bsky.social: a lively and passionate call for a Gothic sensibility as 'romantic anticapitalism' - we need more writing that takes the radical potential in popular culture this seriously

This is the most wonderful, considered - and insightful - discussion of my book I've ever read. Thank you @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social

I'm humbled and awed.

The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova: a darkly satirical lens on contemporary Englishness, with a strong dose of body horror. One or two of these didn't do that much for me, but at their best they're brilliantly weird bits of very black satire, well worth checking out.

Mother Naked by Glen James Brown Glen James Brown’s second novel takes its cue from a minor fragment of recorded history: an entry in the ledger of the Bursar of Durham Priory that records the lowest-paid entertainer ever employed…

For the new year, I've started a new blog for writing on recent fiction (and perhaps other things, eventually) - starting with last year's 'Mother Naked' by @glenjamesbrown.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/m...

It’s a reclamation of Nora and her interior life, in part; the premise might sound academic and/or dryly didactic, but Morrissy makes it come alive, animated by a free indirect style that swings in orbits around Nora, taking in real, imagined and re-imagined people.