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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...

At the close of this issue’s interview with Elad Lassry, who has also provided us with a new artwork for our cover, the artist considers the proposition that ‘everything is art’ Lassry admits he finds this viewpoint challenging ‘Trees, deserts, oceans are phenomena,’ he argues ‘Art is the decision’   Many of the writers in issue 26 choose a decisive and critical position from which to work, challenging the political situations they see unfolding around them An extract from Shumona Sinha’s searing novel Let’s Knock Out the Poor is a reckoning with France’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers based on the author’s own experience of working in an immigration centre; when the book was published in France in 2011, Sinha lost her job Juliana Delgado Lopera’s groundbreaking Fiebre Tropical is written entirely in Spanglish In its inventive and heady mixture of Spanish and English, Lopera captures a Colombian teen’s arrival to Miami and uses language as a political tool to show how inextricably entwined the cultures of Latin America and the United States are We’re also delighted to publish the winner of this year’s White Review Short Story Prize Vanessa Onwuemezi’s story ‘At the Heart of Things’ is a visceral journey into interiority and dreams Formally daring and linguistically metamorphic, it is a worthy winner of a prize established to explore and expand the possibilities of the form   Elsewhere, Khairani Barokka experiments with a hybrid of criticism and poetry by re-examining the figure in Paul Gauguin’s famous portrait Annah La Javanaise through the intersecting lens of race and disability, before imagining new poetic futures for them The psychoanalyst and writer Nuar Alsadir continues the theme of radical reinterpretation by applying Donald Winnicott’s theory of the ‘True Self’ to mothering, writing and Anna Karenina Anwen Crawford’s ‘All Circles Vanish’ is an elegy to a lost friend and a deeply personal meditation on art-making and resistance – a resistance embedded within its unconventional form    We are excited to present an interview with the American scholar Saidiya Hartman Victoria Adukwei Bulley met her in London shortly before the publication of her newest

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

Interview

Issue No. 13

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

Interview

Issue No. 13

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects. Philosophers have discovered in love a lived...

Interview

April 2012

Interview with Grant Gee

Evan Harris

Interview

April 2012

As the theatre is relit and the credits roll on Grant Gee’s latest film, Patience (After Sebald), an essay on...

fiction

Issue No. 19

Once Sublime

Virginie Despentes

TR. Frank Wynne

fiction

Issue No. 19

The music is sick! This guy’s a genius. Always trust Gaëlle. When they first saw him, everyone thought who...

 

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