Dead Not Deid

James Meek: A Great Radical Modernist

“The opening story in James Kelman’s 1998 collection, The Good Times, is called ‘Joe Laughed’. It’s nine pages long and is told from the point of view of a boy who plays football on a patch of waste ground among derelict industrial buildings by the river in a large, unnamed city which British readers are bound to assume is Glasgow. You don’t find out the boy’s name, or his age, although hints and the boy’s style of reflection encourage you to guess he’s between 14 and 16. At half-time, the boy and two friends start exploring an abandoned factory. After a bit, the boy’s friends hit him and run away laughing.” [ read more . . . ]

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton on anonymity

“All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace.” [ read more . . . ]

Diary

Kevin Kopelson: Confessions of a Plagiarist

“I quote too much. Give me a good line – what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph – even a Proustian one – and I’ll shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy.” [ read more . . . ]

At the Grand Palais

Hal Foster on Richard Serra

Short Cuts

Adam Shatz: ‘Immigration Removal Centres’

Letters from William Mallinson, David Hannay, Reed Coughlan, Christopher Price, Robert Latypov and Aleksander Kalikh, Lewis Siegelbaum, Ruth Tenne, Alan Rudrum, Nick de Somogyi, Dave MacKay, Leslie Jackson

Registered subscribers to the print edition of the LRB can also read the following:

Colin Kidd on Hugh Trevor-Roper
Michael Wood: Tolstoy’s Malice
Dan Jacobson on Giorgio Bassani
Quentin Skinner on Milton
Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Fanny Kemble
Rosemary Hill: Das englische Haus
August Kleinzahler on Louis Zukofsky
Joanna Biggs on Keith Gessen
Poems by John Kinsella

For more information see the contents page.