Books

  Time is one of those concepts we like to think we have a handle on. We know we can’t stop its progress, it goes by too fast (usually; although it can also go by far too slowly when we’re at the coalface of work or on a particularly boring Continue Reading

  Adam Kelly, University of York I am someone who reads, teaches, and writes about contemporary American fiction for a living. Knowing this, you might expect that fresh, experimental novels would constantly be arriving on my desk, that I would be inundated with literary innovation. But it is in fact Continue Reading

  We are the products of our life experiences. Even the most empathetic among us is subconsciously influenced by personal worldviews which inform how we interpret everything that anyone says or does to or around us, complicating how we respond to another’s life circumstances that divert greatly from our own. Continue Reading

  It’s hard not to fall in love with Eleanor Oliphant. True, at first, she’s socially awkward, judgmental and cleaves to routine like it’s a liferaft in a stormy sea (you soon discover that’s exactly what it is) and is as alone as a person can get. But as Gail Continue Reading

  If you were to look around the world right now, and to be fair, at any time through history, you would be well justified in concluding that humanity, for the greater part, does not have an expectationally-idealistic bone in its body. From war to famine, disease to relational destructiveness Continue Reading

  There are a great many books I remember fondly from my childhood – the rest of the Rip’d from the Pages of My Childhood series is testament to that – but there is one series in particular that I adore to this day because I fell in love with Continue Reading

    Life is a complicated thing. Anyone who has reached adulthood with life, limbs and psyche relatively intact will attest to the fact that for all its capacity for magical delight and soul-consuming wonder, life also comes with some fairly onerous demands. It’s a hard enough ask for anyone Continue Reading

  We live in a complicated, unforgiving world. You only have to take even momentary stock of current events to realise that there is a great deal wrong with the world we live in and never enough help to be found for those who need it. That’s why David M. Continue Reading

  Reading a book after watching the movie or TV show is always an interesting exercise (the same applies, but in different ways, to the reverse). Not necessarily because one will be good and one will be bad, but purely because it is always fascinating to see how two creative Continue Reading

  In so many crucial ways, people are defined by where they live. It’s not necessarily a conscious thing, although there’s strong evidence that many people gravitate to a particular place such as hippies in northern New South Wales and deliberately let it inform who they are, but it is Continue Reading