The White Review

[Featured Article]

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jacques Testard

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) commanded a $500,000 advance and was released when its author was barely 25. Originating in a creative writing thesis written under the guidance of Joyce Carol Oates when he was an undergraduate at Princeton, it tells the story of one Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew in search of the Ukrainian woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Hailed by The Times as a ‘work of genius’ after which ‘things will never be the same’,

it won the Guardian First Book award and was – unfortunately, disastrously – made into a film starring Elijah Wood in 2005. The praise wasn't universal, with the book also facing charges of preciousness and factual inaccuracy.   His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), is narrated by a 9-year-old boy who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks. Ending in a flipbook showing a figure falling from the Twin Towers – or ascending, depending how one decides to flip th... [Click to read more]

Hunt for American Heiress Continues...
[Online Only]

Hunt for American Heiress Continues...
Seraphina Madsen

Hunt for American Heiress Continues With Bizarre Manuscript Found in Cave in Altamira By ALICE SHIFT 7:00 AM ET   A compact disc bearing a manuscript and the fingerprints of Eugenie Lund, an American heiress missing since August 19--, has been found in a cave in Altamira, Spain. Dr Erik Lund, heir to the publishing empire established by his father and Antarctic explorer, has offered a $2m reward for any informati... [Click to read more]

Art's Fading Sway by Scott Esposito
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Art's Fading Sway: Russian Ark by...
Scott Esposito

I have often fallen asleep in small theatres. It is an embarrassing thing to have happen during one-man shows, and I am certain that at least one actor, a man whose work I have enjoyed on many occasions and whom I admire, saw me sleeping during his one-man show. I dropped off right in the middle of the performance for about fifteen minutes, third row of maybe ten, centre, and for the rest of the time I felt the reve... [Click to read more]

Film: PalFest
[Online Only]

Film: Palestine Festival of Literature
Murat Gökmen

Resistance needs to be recorded. Resistance needs symbols: ideas that can travel faster than speech, last longer than memory. Nowhere is this more understood, more fought over, than in Palestine.   From the inception of the Zionist project, battle has raged over language, over landscape, over image. The ‘land without a people’, the ‘merciless terrorist’, the ‘humane soldier', the occupying army searc... [Click to read more]

REGULAR BLACK by Sam Riviere
[Online Only]

REGULAR BLACK
Sam Riviere

Who wouldn't rather be watching a film about werewolves instead of composing friends' funeral playlists all day I've been suspecting something like must the 1st thought always be "slipping out of her brassiere" or "slipping out of her brassiere" that nobody calls anyone a liar anymore and who misses that unambiguousness that the word "image" has for a long time been inadequate that back then nobody went in... [Click to read more]

Monopoly (after Ashbery) by Sarah Howe
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Monopoly (after Ashbery)
Sarah Howe

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed.I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye.I never eat cake in case of global meltdown.I am my own consolation. I have a troubled relationship with material things:I drop my coppers smugly in the river.(I do everything with an unbearable smugness.)I propose a vote of thanks. I make small errors in your favour. SometimesI pretend nothing is wrong.I won second prize i... [Click to read more]

Reflux by Jose Saramago
[Online Only]

Reflux
José Saramago (tr. Giovanni Pontiero)

First of all, since everything must have a beginning, even if that beginning is the final point from which it cannot be separated, and to say cannot is not to say wishes not, or must not, it is simply impossible, for if such a separation were feasible, we all know that the entire universe would collapse, inasmuch as the universe is a fragile construction incapable of withstanding permanent solutions – first of all,... [Click to read more]

FINALLY RICH by Sam Riviere
[Online Only]

FINALLY RICH
Sam Riviere

I got a job I got a job writing poems oh hi I never met you before going to write you a poem about your anniversary your niece's christening your son's wedding your uncle's funeral you provided a helpful 'factsheet' full of personal details your favourite songs and anecdotes this is my material the tone is 'light' the approach is up to me you will pay £3 a line you will pay £5 a line you will pay £... [Click to read more]

Not Yet Titled by Landon Metz
[Full Article]

The White Review No. 4 Editorial
The Editors

We live in interesting times. A few years ago, with little warning and for reasons obscure to all but a few, an economic system trumpeted as infallible broke down. Since then, while we acquainted ourselves with such apocalyptically dull concepts as collateralised debt and sovereign credit ratings, it has become increasingly clear that our future has, almost literally, been mortgaged away. The result, for the vast maj... [Click to read more]

Contributors to the Current Issue

Deborah Levy, Brian Dillon, Hannah Gregory, Ben Parker, David Lebor, Tom Chivers, Nia Davies, Jesse Ball, Nick van Woert, Orlando Reade, Michael Horovitz, Juergen Teller, Benjamin Eastham, Ray O'Meara, Andy Brown, Sarah Howe, Rye Dag Holmboe, Matt Lomas, Paul Hoover, James Brookes, Julie Brook, Robert Assaye, Ahdaf Soueif, Jacques Testard, Evan Harris, Landon Metz, Gabriele Beveridge

The Editors

Benjamin Eastham is a writer, editor and critic. He currently works at the Hannah Barry Gallery and runs the Wapping Project Bookshop in East London.
Jacques Testard is a freelance editor, writer and translator. In the past he has worked at The Sunday Times, the Paris Review, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

News & Events

  1. Announcing a Q&A with Brian Dillon at the Hackney Bureau on 6 June 2012
  2. William S Burroughs night at Maggs Bros, London on 9 May
  3. Deborah Levy at Shakespeare & Co, Paris on 7 May
  4. April Book of the Month: The Readymades by John Holten (Broken Dimanche Press)
  5. The White Review No. 4: Slideshow

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