A literary and cultural journal exploring books, art, museums, literary travel, and thoughtful reading across borders and cultures.
I took this video below during my trip to Paris this summer, a day of gardens, artists, forgotten lives and the quiet pleasures of simply sitting beneath the trees in the grounds of the Parisian museum with an iced coffee. I began at the Petit Palais, wandering through its beautiful […]
A few days ago I visited the first major retrospective of Richard Dadd’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts since the 1970s. “I always find the love of art strongest in me (…).” Richard Dadd (1817–1886) was one of the most extraordinary artists of the Victorian era. Best known […]
So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch by Karl Ove Knausgård is a deeply personal meditation on Edvard Munch’s art and on why paintings affect us. Knausgård writes in his characteristically introspective style, moving between Munch’s paintings and reflections on memory, death, loneliness, love, creativity, […]
Last weekend I visited the exhibition dedicated to the Estonian modernist painter Konrad Mägi 1878–1925 at Dulwich Picture Gallery, and I found it unbelievably alluring, contemplative and profoundly beautiful. Along with the exhibitions of Leonora Carrington and Hilma af Klint that I attended in Paris, this beautifully curated exhibition has […]
Some gallery visits leave you with a handful of favourite artworks; others leave you thinking differently about art itself. My latest day exploring London’s galleries belonged firmly to the latter. Across six exhibitions, I encountered artists who challenged conventions, expanded the possibilities of painting and sculpture, and invited viewers to […]
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group is one of the most powerful accounts of contemporary Afghanistan because it tells history through the voices of women living through political catastrophe. Created by twenty-one Afghan women brought together by the organisation Untold Narratives, the […]
The Wonders, by Spanish writer Elena Medel, is a lyrical and deeply moving novel that examines how class, gender, money, and history shape the lives of working-class women across generations in Spain, from the second half of the twentieth century into the first half of the twenty-first century. Through the […]
Francisco Goldman’s The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle is a memoir that blends personal grief, travel writing, journalism, and political commentary. Part travelogue and part reportage on Mexican politics and narco-violence, the book follows Goldman several years after the tragic death of his wife, the writer Aura Estrada, as […]
Originally published in 1977, “They” by Kay Dick (1915 – 2001, often credited as “ the first woman director in English publishing”) is a haunting dystopian novel that explores the gradual destruction of individuality, creativity and freedom of expression. Written as a sequence of interconnected, dreamlike episodes, the novel creates […]
A General Theory of Oblivion by the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa is a novel set against the backdrop of Angola’s turbulent transition from Portuguese colonial rule to independence and civil war. Through the story of Ludovica Fernandes Mano, known as Ludo, Agualusa explores themes of memory, the impact of history on individual lives and its randomness, isolation, loneliness, belonging, identity, family, and the position of women in society.