By Maria Bregman I was at a book launch in Bloomsbury a few years back, the kind where the white wine is warm and the…
By Maria Bregman We are taught to admire the lifeboat. In the grand narrative of human suffering, particularly the systematised horror of the Blitz, the…
By Maria Bregman There is a moment of sublime, tragicomic misdirection at the heart of Eshkol Nevo’s novel Honeymoons. A wealthy American Jew, grieving his late…
By Maria Bregman Not long ago, I found myself at a dinner party in Islington, seated between a gallerist despairing over her Hinge profile and…
By Maria Bregman There is a certain type of novel that accrues praise as a forest floor accrues moss: quietly, organically, and with an air…
By Maria Bregman To read R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface as a story about plagiarism is like reading The Great Gatsby as a cautionary tale about bad driving. It is a…
By Maria Bregman There is a persistent and dangerously sentimental belief that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is a book that makes you happy. It is packaged and…
By Anne Fry The paperback has always been the most intimate of literary objects. It is the book you stuff in a bag, the book…
By Sara Bright What is poetry for, in an age of relentless noise? Is it a quiet refuge, a place to hide from the storm?…
By Sara Bright There is a form of sentience that awakens not in silicon, but in the collective consciousness of a place given voice. It…