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an image of Issue 33 of The White Review, featuring three film stills of swimmers in goggles and caps in dark water

The White Review
No. 33

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The White Review No. 33 features interviews with writer Siri Hustvedt and feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. The issue includes new fiction by Gina Apostol,...

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Prize Entry

The White Review Poet’s Prize 2023
For the first time this year, The White Review Poet’s Prize was open to poets based anywhere in the world. Last month we announced a shortlist of eight poets. ...

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Skye Arundhati Thomas
Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Articles Available Online

an chair behind an empty table. The background is a pleated blue curtain, and there is a bouquet of roses on the table. a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah hangs on one side, a folded flag of pakistan on the other.
an chair behind an empty table. The background is a pleated blue curtain, and there is a bouquet of roses on the table. a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah hangs on one side, a folded flag of pakistan on the other.
Interview with Bani Abidi

Interview

Issue No. 33

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Interview

Issue No. 33

In the three-minute short Mangoes (1999) by Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, two women sit next to each other on a white table, each with...

Art Review

February 2019

Simryn Gill, Soft Tissue

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2019

I walked into Simryn Gill’s exhibition SOFT TISSUE at Jhaveri Contemporary on one of the worst days of an...

Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, esteemed contributors, and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2018     CHLOE ARIDJIS, author of BOOK OF CLOUDS   I really enjoyed LIMBO (Fitzcarraldo) by Dan Fox, WHEN WORDS FAIL: A LIFE WITH MUSIC, WAR AND PEACE (Granta) by Ed Vulliamy, and Bob Gilbert’s GHOST TREES: NATURE AND PEOPLE IN A LONDON PARISH (Saraband)   In fiction, I really admired the miniaturist beauty of Carys Davies’ WEST (Granta) This year I also revisited Bohumil Hrabal’s TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE (Abacus), a splendid little novel that packs more into its 98 pages than most books twice its length     JULIA ARMFIELD, winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018   My reading year has been characterised by sudden explosions in the midst of long dry spells Without question the most powerful of these was Elaine Castillo’s AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART (Atlantic) – a gorgeous and gratifyingly huge novel about home and finding a home, replete with food and music and spiky tenderness There was also May-Lan Tan’s short story collection THINGS TO MAKE AND BREAK (Sceptre), which I have recommended to almost everyone I know for its deadpan brilliance, its stories teeming with doubles Lastly, there was Camilla Grudova’s THE DOLL’S ALPHABET (Fitzcarraldo), one of the most purely original collections I’ve read, filled with strange and squirmy imagery, monsters and sewing machines and things with many, many legs     JULIA BELL, writer and Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck   The non-fiction books I really loved this year: Olivia Sudjuc’s EXPOSURE – a timely piece from new publishers Peninsula Press which explores among other things, why being published is much more difficult for women, and how we are often judged by a completely different set of standards In a neat pocket sized edition from a press to watch   The very much missed Mark Fisher’s blog has just been published by Repeater Books as K-PUNK: THE COLLECTED AND UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS OF MARK FISHER (2004-2016) This book is balm for the soul for anyone pissed off with the mess we’re in Clear-sighted, funny, and astute and at over 800 pages, satisfyingly hefty You won’t look like Scrooge if you gift this book I have already bought several copies   THE SECOND BODY by Daisy Hildyard (Fitzcarraldo) considers the relationship between human and animal bodies – a journey that takes her to butchers’ shops

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.
Bani Abidi & Naeem Mohaiemen, I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter 1)

Art Review

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2018

Loneliness is mostly narrative. It also has an aesthetic: an empty tableau in which the lonely act is performed. In Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled...
The characters in We That Are Young reside at ‘The Farm’ – a sprawling house in New Delhi complete with its own topiary of fat peacocks, bulbous pink flowers with English names, Fendi furniture, and a room in which it snows at the press of a button It’s not far removed from reality – Antilla, the world’s first billion-dollar residence for a single family of four, is a 40-storey building that towers over the suburbs of South Mumbai, replete with a staff of over 600 people, its own electrical power grid, ten-storey parking for a collection of unusable vintage cars, and a room, of course, where it snows on demand In dialogue with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Taneja’s debut novel explores the lives of a family that owns a multinational conglomerate, ‘The Company’, to which each character’s fate (and inheritance) is inextricably tied We have our patriarch, the Lear figure, Devraj; his three daughters Sita, Radha and Gargi; and his right-hand man Ranjit’s two sons, Jeet and Jivan The embarrassment of riches makes for an irresistible, if outlandish, setting; Taneja vividly indulges our intrigue in the way the rich conduct their daily lives, letting her words ooze out their luxury – filthy, yet so desirable After a particularly gruesome scene in which Radha administers the plucking out of a man’s eyes, she steps back into her suite and calls for a pot of first flush Assam, and rose macaroons   A reinterpretation of Shakespeare is the perfect postcolonial conquest: he remains the epitome of the Western canon, patriarchal, and repeatedly failing to include representations of the ‘other’ without recourse to parody Mainstream appropriations of Shakespeare in South Asia, such as Bollywood filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), and Haider (Hamlet), have generally taken us to rural settings, wherein tragedy is relegated to a matter of the lower castes Taneja, a Shakespearean academic and human rights activist, eschews such stereotypes, and goes straight for the jugular: the innate hypocrisy of the Indian class and caste system ‘It’s not about land, it’s about money,’ states the first line of the book, taking
Preti Taneja’s ‘We That Are Young’

Book Review

October 2017

Skye Arundhati Thomas

READ NEXT
univers, univers

fiction

July 2013

Régis Jauffret

TR. Jeffrey Zuckerman

fiction

July 2013

I. You remember your childhood. Your tow-headed, reddish-tinged mother, who yelled after you all day like a Paraguayan peasant chasing her donkey. And your...

feature

Issue No. 17

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 17

An Englishman, a Frenchman and an Irishman set up a magazine in London in 2010. This sounds like the...

Art

Issue No. 10

Patterns

Christian Newby

Art

Issue No. 10

poetry

September 2011

First Blimp

Joshua Trotter

poetry

September 2011

Removing colour from my thoughts, I formed a winter ball. I threw it. The dead were uncounted. There was...

 

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