Support The Quietus
Our journalism is funded by our readers. Become a subscriber today to help champion our writing, plus enjoy bonus essays, podcasts, playlists and music downloads.
Our journalism is funded by our readers. Become a subscriber today to help champion our writing, plus enjoy bonus essays, podcasts, playlists and music downloads.
From the esoteric to the sonic, tQ’s bookshelf revealed
British Sea Power tome Do It For Your Mum is one of the best books about rock and family you'll read. Its author Roy Wilkinson gives an update on the group and their parents, and attempts to put right some of the many misconceptions about the group
Daniel Fraser speaks to Simon Critchley about the architecture of memory and a move toward its obliteration, the culture of stigma surrounding death in our current civilisation (as well as his distaste for that term) and his recent genre-bending philosophical treatise-cum-novel Memory Theatre
Daisy Lafarge examines the ideas of empathy, accountability and the reality of immateriality as they present themselves in the contemporary experience of, both, women and men via Leslie Jamison's collection of essays, exploring - bodily and textually, physically and metaphorically - the concept of the wound, The Empathy Exams. (Image: Doris Salcedo)
Nathalie Olah speaks to one of contemporary literature's most impressive polymaths - novelist, non-fiction writer, photographer, cultural commentator and art historian Teju Cole - about the pros and cons of cultural appropriation, being a writer in the social media age and the otherworldliness of birds. (Photograph by Teju Cole)
Stephanie Boland gets into the myriad complexities of The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle's world-within-a-world, game-within-a-book debut novel, Wolf in White Van, finding a not unfamiliar cast of characters and references, teen angst made something more potent and a powerful treatise on memory
Richard Fontenoy examines this exploration, neither biography nor hagiography, memoir nor biography, of the life of John Balance and of Coil, finding a collection of remembrances - of poetry, of photography and of personal reminiscences - free from mawkishness, which serve not only to recall but to add to an extraordinary legacy
Daniel Fraser speaks to Lars Iyer, author of the Spurious trilogy (encompassing Spurious, Dogma and Exodus), about what makes the philosopher such an attractive subject for his work, a secret desire for lightness and the flatness of characters in his new novel, Wittgenstein Jr
Recent Poetry School Digital Poet in Residence and Selected Poems editor Alex MacDonald speaks to one of the most recognisable names in British poetry, Simon Armitage, about the undercurrent of violence in his work, the perils of being a Northern Poet and his new book of selected poems, Paper Aeroplane
Prefaced by a short, self-conducted Q&A, we present an extract from author and philosopher Simon Critchley's new book on David Bowie — part personal memoir, part critique — in which we move between Diamond Dogs and Danton's Death, from Nietzsche to the French Revolution
Vol.1 Brooklyn managing editor Tobias Carroll writes on geographical anxiety, the near-reality of the post-apocalyptic science fiction narrative and the contemporary relationship of distrust between man and nature. (Photograph by Carlos Gutierrez)
New writing this week is part of an on-going collaboration between authors Elizabeth Mikesch and May-Lan Tan, Planetette, the product of an aggressive approach, vandalising each other's sentences until it's no longer clear who has written what
Weary of the standard review format — of answering the question 'Yeah, but is it any good?' — Kit Caless, publisher at Influx Press, sits down with novelist and academic Heidi James to discuss their experience of Ben Myers' new novel Beastings
Sign up for a weekly delve into the tQ archives.
