PanIrish Times (IRE)Nelson essentially argues that any criticism of Swift is the result of the patriarchy’s obsession with silencing women. This is hard to take seriously ... If this is the kind of silencing Nelson is worried about, I would quite like to live in her version of patriarchy ... Finishing this hopefully intentionally unserious book, I felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety emanating from its pages. It struck me that Nelson, who made her name as a brilliant, subversive chronicler of queer sex, cruelty and desire, is afraid of being judged for liking something so blandly common denominator. I want to tell her it’s okay – she’s allowed to like the popular thing without having to anxiously argue that it comes from a place of maligned feminist indignation.
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)As a novel, it feels a little lacklustre. At times, the plot feels like a loose scaffold for Laing’s compendium of self-conscious historic signifiers ... Laing is a masterful essayist, always keenly attuned to queer art history’s most interesting figures, and The Silver Book is, ultimately, a timely exploration of the persistence of art under political duress – but it might have been a more satisfying book if Laing had chosen the form in which they most excel, the essay, instead.
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Flat Earth is a strange and smart new addition to the canon of novels about young women coming undone in big cities ... Evokes the same nihilistic post-feminism as two recent films about the commodification of youth and femininity in America: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and Celine Song’s Materialists ... I read this book the same way I sometimes scroll through X late at night: quickly, compulsively and with an intense worry for the fate of the world which lingers long after I put down my phone. Flat Earth feels like having stared into the blue light too long – I imagine this is just what Levy intended.
PositiveIrish Times (IRE)Didion conveys [her psychiatrist] with such detail I wondered if she’d brought a dictaphone to therapy ... Undeniably affecting, and Didion’s swerves between fear and frustration will be acutely familiar to anyone who’s lived with a loved one’s addiction ... Notes to John is full of the kind of clear-eyed detail that made Joan Didion her name. Obviously this is a woman to whom words mattered—I’m just not sure we should be reading these ones.
