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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...

A Few Words on Maria Sudayeva   Slogans is a strange, extraordinary book: it describes a universe of total war where humanity no longer exists, or rather only in traces, and where the actors — actresses, rather, since these are almost always feminine creatures who appear and utter cries of rage — seem to belong to a dominant species other than homo sapiens It’s also extraordinary in its form: a series of instructions and slogans that describe, with the only narrative techniques being their alignment and their brutality, the chaos and suffering, the distant hopes, the apocalyptic whirlwind, the suicidal unrest of an entire planet No explanatory prose smoothes over the collision between writers and this terrifying war; no external voice slips into the text to guide the visitor and tell him the story No narrator, no characters, and yet a story transpires, filled with grandiose events and barely-felt emotions: an epic It’s a magnificent fiction wholly distanced from the ordinary traditions of the novel and, if poetry didn’t have such a poor reputation nowadays, it might even be said to evoke a sort of long poem   But this book becomes even stranger once we realise that Maria Sudayeva wrote it in two languages, French and Russian, accumulating neologisms and inextricably entwining the two idioms, with a conscious intent to refuse her images any tidy cultural anchor, and undoubtedly to affirm her disgust toward all manners of nationalism, even linguistic Because this woman, who took her life before she could be recognized for who she was — one of the most original artists of the new, post-Soviet generation, if not the most original — was also a partisan She was wary of a rebirth — she was certain of it — of Great Russian nationalism which would arise from the new Russia’s commercial and Mafia roots, and in opposition she maintained the principles of internationalism and radical cosmopolitan behaviour I met her once, in a place where the Russian world was shown in an unflattering light, and it was clear that her ability to speak Russian discomfited her She struggled to differentiate

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 2017

The Bad Thing

Annie Julia Wyman

Prize Entry

April 2017

1.   It must have been around the same time she decided that she really was using all the...

fiction

May 2016

See Inside for Holiday Special

Joanna Quinn

fiction

May 2016

We are not tourists. We are journalists. We fly out from Heathrow, Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle to foreign airports...

Interview

Issue No. 9

Interview with Rebecca Solnit

Tess Thackara

Interview

Issue No. 9

Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, like many of her books and essays, is a tapestry of autobiographical narrative, environmental and...

 

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