Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris’s new play, Second Best, inspired by the novel of the same name by David Foenkinos, opens on January 24th at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Starring Asa Butterfield (Sex Education), the play is directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Fly Davis, and runs till February 22nd.
Book your tickets here.
Hi everyone!
After a brief hiatus, the MSt blog is now back with updates from the new course team: Clare, Amal, Kate, Mary Jean and Barney. We’re kicking off with an entry from Mary Jean, our new Departmental Lecturer in Poetry. Here is what they have been reading and researching lately:
What I’m Reading Now
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
This is a mesmerizing novel which meditates on how we might respond to our world’s multiple crises (ecological or otherwise) – can we flee from them as the protagonist in the novel attempts to do by deciding to live in a convent, and is it in fact possible to keep ourselves safe from the uncomfortable truths we’d rather not look in the eye? The novel asks difficult questions about forgiveness, guilt and how one might live ethically. I loved Wood’s writing style; she has the precision of a poet and draws the reader in with sensual, atmospheric scenes.
James by Percival Everett
I found Everett’s retelling of the classic story of Huckleberry Finn deeply moving and eye-opening. Language is foregrounded in this novel: it becomes a tool for camouflage for slaves who need to appear as if they can’t read or speak eloquently to satisfy the twisted egos and expectations of their white slave owners. I also found the complex friendship between James and Huck to be honest and sincere, and it is ultimately their relationship which constitutes the beating heart of this novel. This is a book which will stay with me for a very long time.
Current Projects / Research
I am researching what ‘queer reading’ means in preparation for the 2025 LGBT+ History Month lecture which I will be giving next year at Oxford. I’ve been excited about a forthcoming book titled The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2024) and have been returning to the writings of Sara Ahmed for inspiration, particularly Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). I am also working on an essay for a series in Poetry Magazine called ‘Hard Feelings’, having chosen ‘anger’ as the feeling I’d like to focus on. This is proving to be a hard essay to write indeed, but it has also been a nice excuse for me to return to interesting work by D.W. Winnicott, Alison Bechdel and Darian Leader which are enabling me to think through familiar concepts in a different light.
MSt alum Bette Adriaanse’s new novel, What’s Mine, is coming out with US publisher Unnamed Press this August.
There will be several launch events, as follows:
AUGUST 15, 6PM UK time, ONLINE: Bette joins Caoilinn in Conversation for Chicago bookstore Exile in Bookville.
AUGUST 16, 7PM, LOS ANGELES, CA: North Fig Books with Gallagher Lawson.
Details: https://northfigbookshop.com/events/?page=1
AUGUST 22, 7PM, SAN FRANCISCO, CA: The Interval at Long Now Foundation with Chelsea T. Hicks, Brian Eno, Aqui Thami and Margaret Levi.
Details: https://longnow.org/ideas/radical-sharing/
AUGUST 25, SAN FRANCISCO, CA: The Internet Archive.
Details: find details on www.betteadriaanse.nl soon
“WHAT’S MINE is a surprising and deep work with a persistent quiet momentum carrying the reader back-and-forth in time and space across the slivers of four interlocking lives. It is totally engaging.”
—BRIAN ENO
“Bette Adriaanse is becoming a major literary novelist in the best European tradition. She has the down-and-out life experiences of the early Orwell, the desperate humor of Flann O’Brien, the prose immediacy of Beckett, and the avalanche of bureaucracy of Kafka. WHAT’S MINE is a stellar achievement of depicting the absurdist brutality of contemporary urban capitalism where nothing but narcissism and arbitrary outcomes rule.”
—ALAN N SHAPIRO
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