Mailing List


Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

In The Art of the Publisher, Roberto Calasso suggests that publishing is something approaching an art form, whereby ‘all books published by a certain publisher could be seen as links in a single chain, or segments in a serpentine progression of books, or fragments in a single book formed by all the books published by that publisher’ A publisher’s success can be judged, he continues, by its ‘capacity to give form to a plurality of books as though they were the chapters of a single book All this while taking care – a passionate and obsessive care – over the appearance of every volume, over the way in which it is presented’ With these words Calasso, the legendary director of Italian publishing house Adelphi, captures something of what we attempt with each new issue of The White Review, considering it in relation to its predecessors as a new segment in a serpentine progression, or one fragment of a single and as yet incomplete book   Indeed, in this issue can be seen a continuation of the same themes that have preoccupied us since the beginning of this quixotic publishing venture New literature in translation – from the extraordinary French novelist Maylis de Kerangal, the great Hungarian László Krasznahorkai and the celebrated Korean poet Ko Un – is complemented by some of the most exciting voices to have emerged from Britain and Ireland over recent years in Caleb Klaces, Declan Ryan and Luke Brown Our dedication to hybrid, radical forms is apparent in the publication of Anne Carson’s ‘lyric lecture with chorus’ – a work that could as easily be produced on stage or film as within these pages – and Brian Dillon’s ekphrastic meditation on charisma, faith, and loss The combination of art and literature has always been a guiding principle of this project, and here we are delighted to present works by installation artist Alicja Kwade, a photographic series from Germany’s Annette Kelm, and new work by Swiss artists Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs Our catholic (a generous interpretation) tastes are reflected in the publication of a long-form essay on

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

Art

Issue No. 7

Pyramid Schemes: Reading the Shard

Lawrence Lek

Art

Issue No. 7

These sketches were created to illustrate an essay by Lawrence Lek in The White Review No. 7, ‘Pyramid Schemes:...

Interview

Issue No. 19

Interview with Álvaro Enrigue

Thomas Bunstead

Interview

Issue No. 19

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer who lives and teaches in New York. A leading light in the Spanish-language...

fiction

Issue No. 8

Estate

China Miéville

fiction

Issue No. 8

Two nights running I woke up with my heart going crazy. The first time, as I lay there in...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required