Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
In the 1980s, when Tom LeClair wrote about ‘systems novels’...
Ben Hamilton
Freelance writer, critic and editor
Featured book reviews
Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of ‘Make Me' by Andy Martin
This book claims to be among the first of its kind – an over-the-shoulder biography of a novel in progress...
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A O Scott
Sooner or later all critics of high standing feel compelled to justify what they do for a living...
Pulling Teeth: In Search of a Quality Metallica Biography
In the excellent British documentary Mission to Lars journalist Kate Spicer pledges to take her brother Tom to meet his hero, Lars Ulrich...
A Merry Dance: Will Self Takes on Modernism
When Will self published his first short story collection, 1991’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity, British critics...
Dangerous to Know: On Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems
At least twice in Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending, Barnes’s humdrum narrator Tony Webster...
Featured articles
The horror of post-Brexit Britain: Perfidious Albion, by Sam Byers, reviewed
Edmundsbury, the fictional, sketchily rendered town in which the action of this novel takes place, is part of a social...
Six wintry days in Saratoga Springs: Upstate by James Wood reviewed
Alan Querry, the central figure in James Wood’s second novel, is someone who, in his own words, doesn’t ‘think about...
Hari Kunzru’s White Tears feels like a racial revenge fantasia
The title might be taken as a provocation. In the compressed language of digital media, white tears, like first-world problems...
Can Eimear McBride do it again?
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride’s acclaimed, prize-winning debut, felt like a one-off, not the beginning of a...
From dressing-gown drudge to Man Booker winner
John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a standard text for...
The theory wars have ended in stalemate
State-of-criticism overviews and assessments almost always strike a bleak note —the critical mind naturally angles towards pessimism — so it...
Don’t mock pro wrestling. Today’s TV is made in its image
Earlier this month, when a 54-year-old man with the birth name James Brian Hellwig died of a suspected heart attack...
Refining the audience
Last year the British stand-up comedian Stewart Lee published his first nonfiction book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian...
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Dead again
Are horror films winding down for retirement?
The C word
Comic books are out of their ghetto—but critical acceptance comes with a price...