By Alexander Stone In the collective imagination, British fairy tales are polite affairs – Paddington at a railway station, Peter Rabbit stealing lettuce, the Wind…
When Netflix announced that Lena Dunham was creating a new romantic comedy series set in London, the cultural press braced itself for a seismic transatlantic…
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 Alexander Stone The sound of modern Britain is not the chime of Big Ben, nor the roar of a stadium, nor even the apologetic…
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…
The history of the floral still life is often burdened by its own domesticity. Relegated for centuries to the realm of the decorative, painting flowers…
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 Tessa Nolan There is a tedious paradox at the heart of modern culture: the more desperately an artist contorts themselves for our attention, the…