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In 2012, the Jordanian novelist and activist Fadi Zaghmout published his first novel, The Bride of Amman, dealing with the brutality of gender and sexual norms and conventions within the city of Amman. A best-seller, and only translated into English last summer, The Bride of Amman is a short and compelling read, interweaving five different […]
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Ankita Saxena is a second year English student at Jesus College, and is president of this year’s Turl Streets Arts Festival, a collaborative effort between the colleges of Turl Street- Exeter, Jesus and Lincoln- to hold an annual festival celebrating and embracing the arts. The Turl Street Arts Festival is in its 19th year and […]
Continue ReadingThroughout school peers and some teachers never considered me as ‘intelligent’ as ‘brainy’ but I was ‘creative’, and ‘artistic’. There’s no doubt this is a gender issue: where boys are more likely to be described as brainy and intellectual girls are creative and imaginative, and this division manifests in their subject choices and decisions. To […]
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Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) is probably the best-known Gulag writer after Solzhenitsyn, spending twelve years in labour camps. He wrote lots of short stories about his experiences. This one is from his collection The Resurrection of the Larch, and describes his arrival at a remote prison camp. The Berth of Hell (1967) The heavy doors of […]
Continue ReadingPlease don’t think I’m crazy but There were stalwarts on street corners And grass stains on your jeans I knew we built the steps too steeply I’m grateful for the space between our mouths Stained red from homemade wine Your kids played on the water’s edge All chubby calves and dimpled fingers I […]
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Ironic, perhaps, that Vincent van Gogh spurned fame in 1882, reflecting that: “I’ve never felt a desire (and I don’t believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work […] a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.” His contemporary popularity is indeed certain, with his most famous works […]
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A thought-provoking read that will resonate with many and serve as a source of comfort when it feels like everything is falling apart. I ordered The Versions of Us instantly when I found out it was about a couple that met in their second year at Cambridge. As someone who developed an obsession with all […]
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It is an important and oft-lamented fact that students never have time for pleasure reading. Between deadlines, social lives and cleaning flatmates’ vomit off the bathroom ceiling (which is as inconvenient as it is mildly impressive), the student lifestyle simply doesn’t leave room for anything as time-consuming as a novel. Short fiction, on the other […]
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Sylvia Plath is the woman that I’m embarrassed to write about in my degree in case I’m judged as a clichéd mentally ill English student. It’s remarkable how much this embarrassment misses the point of The Bell Jar. It is an incredible book that shows how the protagonist’s experience of sexism contributes to her breakdown. […]
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“Class distinctions in England have always been the matter for higher feeling than national honour, the matter of feverish but very private debate”, wrote Evelyn Waugh. In the 1950s, talk of class was off-limits in polite society, yet now this discussion has moved resolutely into the public domain. In 2011, more than 300,000 people volunteered […]
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Released barely a year after his previous novel, Slade House is simultaneously vintage David Mitchell and unlike anything he has ever published before. Developing from a rather gimmicky Twitter short story released as part of the marketing strategy for the titanic The Bone Clocks, Mitchell’s latest offering is far and away his shortest yet, as […]
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