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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival With the word arrival, though, I’ve already said too much: there’s something so familiar in the soapy taste of the air that I wouldn’t dream of describing my walk into town as a return: I don’t think of myself coming back; I’ve never been away No, I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that’s all: in truth it was the town that never really left me The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval I always had this impression, long before the whole country’s upheaval, and it lingered after the country’s authorities had surrendered and fled, after the government and its closest vassals had been replaced: this town seemed in no way to confirm the changing of the system In a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis, and that collapse had survived the regime change   For years I fled from the town, years that have sped from my grasp as though chased by the furies, and yet never passed quickly enough for me These are all the years I can recall with ease, quite in contrast to those I spent here in this town It’s as though in those other cities, the bigger, more attractive ones I chose to live in, I never really settled down Those cities’ easily summoned images were dimmed by a sense of loss, a sentimental feeling originating in this town to which I return from time to time It’s here that this barely explicable sense of absence grew on me, one I only really felt once I had settled down elsewhere with the more or less firm resolution to stay It made itself felt as a kind of living without a background, it was a state of severance, a state without a past, and yet I’d learned to feel severed from the past in the small town afternoons   Time persisted here in dogged immutability; the autumnal fog

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Interview

March 2015

Interview with Jonathan Meades

Jamie Sutcliffe

Interview

March 2015

The television broadcasts of Jonathan Meades are marked by a surreal humour, a polymathic breadth of knowledge, and a...

poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

Art

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

 

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