I’m thrilled to have a book review on 4Columns, a new site for arts criticism at its best and liveliest. I wrote about “The Art of Waiting,” by Belle Boggs, an empathetic and brave memoir on mothering, fertility, and the politics of assisted reproduction. Read it now at 4columns.org.

I was nineteen when I first read ‘Crow’, and it probably marked me for life. Ted Hughes’s 1970 cycle of poems about a mythical, shamanic, monstrous creature was violent, cynical, despairing, and nasty, and therefore both troubling and deeply satisfying to my adolescent mind. The poems were […]

In my first draft of this review I said ‘Fates and Furies’ was both brilliant and boring. My editor said, “If it’s a bad book we shouldn’t run a long piece on it.” I said, “It’s not bad. I didn’t say it was bad. It’s original and terrifically inventive. It’s just got slow patches and […]

Melanie is fifteen, innocent, and full of romantic dreams. She pretends to be a girl in a film, a magazine, a painting. She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug, Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain wound round her head (…) She stuck moon-daisies in […]

I was asked to write about my ‘year’s best’ books, which always makes me feel anxious and guilty (of not reading enough, of not having interesting taste). So instead I wrote about being alone for a few days, reading for ‘The Baby on the Fire Escape’ and discovering the unexpected.

To read her new memoir M Train you would hardly know that Patti Smith is a rock star. She doesn’t let on that at sixty-eight she’s a hard-working performer, touring, lecturing, doing benefit concerts, going to parties with fashion designers, making appearances with the Dalai Lama. In her sequel to Just Kids, her magical 2010 […]