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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...

Elia was going to be posted to Iraq next month to work for Doctors Without Borders and this evening had turned partly into his Goodbye Party Currently he was talking about a murder by ‘defenestration’ – there was the murder and then there was the word His way of telling the story was staled with rehearsal, I suspected it was his latest silence filler and we were not witnessing the debut performance John recalling enough of his lone semester at Institut Francais cut in with, ‘oh of course la fenetre! It makes parfait sense’ while swirling his wine glass – a parody of himself It was hard to believe that I had once had a crush on him A while back he told me that he was ‘so jealous’ of me being ‘SO unencumbered by the history of art’, of my ‘authentic atavism’ in relation to my short videos The more time passed the more grating I found that comment His paintings made me think that he was just another person stuck in competition with Rembrandt, propelled by ego and a love of sepia Under his leadership the conversation moved on to the origin of the word ‘essay’ and the current state of the form Sibs walked in with June He had a moustache and a goatee but his wiry pube-beard was better suited to a close stubble or to being clean-shaven He said that he was ignoring us for the past couple of weeks because he had been on a ‘mental health break’ He was freshly out of rehab where he had been sent after spending three days high and drunk and excited The morass of apparent laziness and irresponsibility that rose to the surface suppressed any real concern that anyone but his long-suffering mother could muster for him Elia and John started playing chess on an ornamental set I was thinking of leaving Earlier in the evening this party and my life had seemed full of possibility Now, neither did I’d felt on the verge of something momentous, a vague invincibility but it was fast dissipating along

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

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

Interview

Issue No. 15

Interview with Zadie Smith

Jennifer Hodgson

Interview

Issue No. 15

Zadie Smith’s biography is one of contemporary writing’s fondest and most famous yarns of precocious and meteoric literary success....

Prize Entry

April 2017

The Critic of Tombs

Ethan Davison

Prize Entry

April 2017

Emilia came to Tombs [1] in the twelfth year of the interregnum. It was the first time in history...

 

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