
Murder, mystery and mind games
The time when writers regarded television sceptically – either as a threat to the storytelling dominance of novels or even, in some cases, as a form of lowbrow entertainment – seems far away now. It’s hard to believe that as recently as David Foster Wallace, writers were expressing anxiety about the relationship between fiction and...

A laughing boy and music from a cracked kettle
Elizabeth McKenzie is the senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing editor of Catamaran. Her novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction, winner of the California Book Award, and a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her collection Stop That Girl was shortlisted for The Story Prize, and her novel MacGregor Tells the...

‘Love you, man’
Will Schwalbe’s multi-decade memoir We Should Not Be Friends kicks off at Yale in the early eighties, when the author is selected for membership in a secret society (no, not that Yale secret society) for his senior year. Looking back at his initiation into the group, Schwalbe describes his impressions of his fellow inductees; one in particular, wrestling-team star...

Fast Fashion in the age of the Sun King
Open up Tiktok – or Instagram, if you prefer. Depending on your viewing habits, you might see mostly influencers unboxing bales of new clothing from Shein and other fast-fashion retailers, or laughing over cheap knockoffs that don’t live up to the photos online, or styling their wardrobe of vintage pieces from the Victorian era up...

Close at hand and out of reach
Jonathan Escoffery’s debut novel is bold and beautiful. It’s told over seven interconnected stories and from different members of the same family. A Jamaican family come to the USA to find a better life for their sons Delano and Trelawny but things don’t work out as planned. When his parents split up Trelawny stays with...

Look to the skies
The novella Boundless as the Sky takes place in Chicago on a single day – 15 July, 1933. It is based closely on a true event, the arrival of a “roaring armada of goodwill” in the form of twenty-four seaplanes flown in a display of fascist power by Mussolini’s wingman Italo Balbo to Chicago’s Century of Progress...

F. Scott Fitzgerald bathes in the light on the French Riviera
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1896–1940) literary brilliance as the witty and worldly-wise chronicler of the Jazz Age and his youthful, suntanned good looks were regularly commented on during his heyday in the 1920s. Later, in the light of what followed, they were recalled in sorrow, anger and disappointment. By the time the writer died in Hollywood...

Starting small
Lord knows why, but starting my own small press has been a dream as long as I can remember. Guess I’m allergic to money. When I was child, I used to make little books out of typing paper and staples; in my twenties, when no one wanted to publish me, I made pamphlets out of...

The closeted and the curious
Having previously published The Last Ballad (2018) and When Ghosts Come Home (February 2022), Faber has now released Wiley Cash’s early novels A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy for the first time in the UK. A Land More Kind Than Home is a Southern Gothic thriller about the charismatic...