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David Isaacs
David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end of a first novel and is at the early stages of a new project about the present tense.


Articles Available Online


Interview with Namwali Serpell

Interview

December 2020

David Isaacs

Interview

December 2020

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction. Since we first spoke, in September 2020,...

Book Review

June 2018

Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’

David Isaacs

Book Review

June 2018

There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names. The...

It is commonly agreed that desire is a self-perpetuating rather than substantive thing Everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Nietzsche to the Buddha himself has commented on the dissatisfaction inherent in obtaining what we want Desire is, we are told, an endlessly hungry beast, and to feed it is only to stoke its appetite If desire is itself mercurial and shifting, womanly desire is considered a particularly unreal quantity ‘The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man,’ said Coleridge, and this assumption is seen everywhere in art and in life, in woman as subject, woman as muse, woman as vessel   Desire always exists for its own sake, leading to nothing, meaning nothing, then But womanly desire is not even for its own sake It is for the sake of others The only desire women are supposed to feel is the desire to satiate the desires of men   This being our history, woman’s proactive desire being a relatively recent concept, there is often an absence of definition when we attempt to discuss it Can we talk about what woman’s desire is, rather than what it is not? Fire Sermon, this thrilling, maddening debut novel by acclaimed short story author Jamie Quatro, tries to do that   Fire Sermon sees Maggie Ellman – a devoutly religious mother of two, married to the dopily, blandly loyal Thomas – sort through the ecstasy and eventual grief of an adulterous relationship with James, a poet Maggie’s affair is largely emotional at first, a lengthy email correspondence exciting her need for intellectual play and earnest discussion of Christian faith with a fellow believer, neither of which are possible with Thomas   There follow painfully, arousingly repressed meetings, at a conference in Nashville and then in New York, and finally, a single night of intemperate sex in a hotel room in Chicago Fire Sermon is concerned with the aftermath of this night, with Maggie’s need to set the act into a religious framework, and the effect this catastrophic submission to desire has upon her belief in marriage and in

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Pylons

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2017

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt....

Seasickness

Prize Entry

April 2016

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water, and hesitates. She says, ‘Maybe:...
How things are falling.

Prize Entry

April 2015

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015 they will have been replaced...
by Accident

fiction

April 2014

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic or anything like that (and...

READ NEXT

poetry

January 2013

Three Poems from Strawberry Aftertaste/ Ostateczny Smak Truskawek

Genowefa Jakubowska-Fijałkowska

TR. Marek Kazmierski

poetry

January 2013

  * * * zieleń jest zielona   z rana przymrozki   czujesz to w ziemi   w białej...

Art

Issue No. 11

Sarah Jones

Sarah Jones

Art

Issue No. 11

A series of photographs by the acclaimed British artist Sarah Jones is published in The White Review No. 11. 

feature

Issue No. 15

A Weekend With My Own Death

Gabriela Wiener

TR. Lucy Greaves

feature

Issue No. 15

We all have tombs from which we travel. To reach mine I have to get a lift with some...

 

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