Lies and Life Of Bella Hatherley

 

Another extract from our unpublished novel. Bella has yet another problem to deal with when her mother Pixi falls under the influence of the  self-styled guru Dahabara and brings her for a visit:

Elizabeth Berridge – Rose Under Glass

Penelope Hinton is sunk in grief. For twenty-five years she and her husband Jamie, an artist, have had a passionate relationship that is the most important aspect of her life. Jamie has his art, and Penelope gives that primacy over the life of their family She is the conduit between him and his admirers and colleagues. Their children know where her first loyalty lies. When Jamie absent-mindedly steps off the kerb into the path of a lorry she is ‘amazed and affronted.’ She is isolated in her grief because she and Jamie ‘had a special kind of communication which excluded everyone else.’

Richard Yates: A Good School

Mrs Midas – Carol Ann Duffy

 

Louise Gluck wins Nobel Prize

Recently we posted Louise Gluck’s poem Lamium and we’ve also posted excerpts from other poems in her collection The Wild Iris. She’s just won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Every Third Thought – Robert McCrum

In 1995 Robert McCrum, literary editor of The Observer and former editorial director at Faber and Faber, suffered a massive stroke. He was only forty-two years old and had just got married. There followed a long struggle to rehabilitate and regain the use of his left side. By 2013 he had been through deep depression and his marriage had ended.

Kay Ryan

Sigrid Nunez – What are you going through

Sigrid Nunez  is usually a writer I enjoy and respect, but in her attempt to address friendship, illness and death in her latest book I feel she never goes beyond the superficial.On the second last page of the book she tells us her title, What are you Going Through, taken from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Weil, means in French quel est ton tourment? ‘Tourment’ can be translated as, torment, pain, or suffering, more extreme one would have thought than the bland English words of her title. And, sadly, I felt there was something bland and random about this book. The characters don’t come alive. Is the fault in the writing, or is it that affluent white American society can be like this; a sterile life of focusing on appearances, a fetishisation of sex, a lack of closeness ?