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

Articles Available Online


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...

First published in The White Review No 14, July 2015   In Rachel Cusk’s eighth novel, OUTLINE, a character named Anne, who has just suffered a violent attack, explains why she considers it important to speak about her experience ‘If people were silent about the things that had happened to them,’ she asks, ‘was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them?’ Cusk’s work — fiction and non-fiction – is imbued with the same defiant honesty to which her characters aspire Her non-fiction books – especially AFTERMATH, a raw, elliptical response to her 2009 divorce, and A LIFE’S WORK, a memoir about the bewilderment of first-time motherhood – have attracted vitriol from readers who balk at the candour with which she writes about personal subjects; praise from those who admire her determination to question herself, her refusal to conform to established female roles   Cusk’s career has, on paper, been conventional and glittering Her 1993 debut, SAVING AGNES, won the Whitbread First Novel Award when Cusk, like her characters, was fresh from university; her third novel, the Wodehouse-esque comedy of manners THE COUNTRY LIFE, earned the Somerset Maugham Award She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and her latest novel, OUTLINE, was shortlisted for the Bailey’s and Folio prizes; soon after we meet, its cover could be found adorning posters on the tube Her work seems to follow the trajectory of a life: four years on from A LIFE’S WORK, Orange Prize-shortlisted ARLINGTON PARK (2005) featured an array of desperate housewives, suburban mothers who contemplate child-murder as they negotiate coffee-mornings and dinner parties In THE BRADSHAW VARIATIONS (2009), Tonie has had enough, and goes back to work, guiltily leaving her husband at home with their daughter By OUTLINE, the protagonist is divorced, her children grown: Faye is in Athens to teach a creative writing course, mirroring the details of a British Council tour Cusk herself embarked on in 2012 Far from being self-revelatory, Faye is an unknowable narrator, her name only revealed towards the novel’s end: OUTLINE accumulates the stories

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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Prize Entry

April 2015

The Incidental

Luke Melia

Prize Entry

April 2015

The automatic rifle fire was followed by an unnerving whistle at Ti’s ear. He gripped the shopping bags, grabbed...

feature

Issue No. 7

The White Review No. 7 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 7

A few issues back we grandiosely stated ‘that it is more important now than ever to provide a forum...

poetry

July 2011

Comfort Station

Medbh McGuckian

poetry

July 2011

A witness has said that you raped women And brought them to the barracks to be used by the...

 

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