Articles Available Online

Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, esteemed contributors, and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2018     CHLOE ARIDJIS, author of BOOK OF CLOUDS   I really enjoyed LIMBO (Fitzcarraldo) by Dan Fox, WHEN WORDS FAIL: A LIFE WITH MUSIC, WAR AND PEACE (Granta) by Ed Vulliamy, and Bob Gilbert’s GHOST TREES: NATURE AND PEOPLE IN A LONDON PARISH (Saraband)   In fiction, I really admired the miniaturist beauty of Carys Davies’ WEST (Granta) This year I also revisited Bohumil Hrabal’s TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE (Abacus), a splendid little novel that packs more into its 98 pages than most books twice its length     JULIA ARMFIELD, winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018   My reading year has been characterised by sudden explosions in the midst of long dry spells Without question the most powerful of these was Elaine Castillo’s AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART (Atlantic) – a gorgeous and gratifyingly huge novel about home and finding a home, replete with food and music and spiky tenderness There was also May-Lan Tan’s short story collection THINGS TO MAKE AND BREAK (Sceptre), which I have recommended to almost everyone I know for its deadpan brilliance, its stories teeming with doubles Lastly, there was Camilla Grudova’s THE DOLL’S ALPHABET (Fitzcarraldo), one of the most purely original collections I’ve read, filled with strange and squirmy imagery, monsters and sewing machines and things with many, many legs     JULIA BELL, writer and Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck   The non-fiction books I really loved this year: Olivia Sudjuc’s EXPOSURE – a timely piece from new publishers Peninsula Press which explores among other things, why being published is much more difficult for women, and how we are often judged by a completely different set of standards In a neat pocket sized edition from a press to watch   The very much missed Mark Fisher’s blog has just been published by Repeater Books as K-PUNK: THE COLLECTED AND UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS OF MARK FISHER (2004-2016) This book is balm for the soul for anyone pissed off with the mess we’re in Clear-sighted, funny, and astute and at over 800 pages, satisfyingly hefty You won’t look like Scrooge if you gift this book I have already bought several copies   THE SECOND BODY by Daisy Hildyard (Fitzcarraldo) considers the relationship between human and animal bodies – a journey that takes her to butchers’ shops