August Blue by Deborah Levy review / Double trouble in Greece

‘The narrative has a fittingly musical quality’: Deborah Levy. Photograph: Sarah Lee

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

The best fiction of 2023

August Blue by Deborah Levy review – double trouble in Greece

A doppelganger leads the way to suppressed secrets in the author’s wistful, fabular new novel

Olivia Laing

Monday 24 April 2023

A

young woman in an Athens flea market sees a stranger buy two mechanical horses, which dance when their tails are pulled up. Both women are wearing the same coat, a green trench, tightly belted. The watcher, too, covets the horses. As she greedily observes the transaction, she is compelled by the sense that she is looking at herself, “that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her.”

Deborah Levy, 2017.

The long read

How Deborah Levy can change your life

From her shimmering novels to her ‘living autobiographies’, Deborah Levy’s work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve

Charlotte Higgins
Tuesday 4 April 2023

Last August, the author Deborah Levy began to sit for her portrait. The starting point was a selfie – eyes penetrating, lips sensuous, head topped by a tower of chestnut hair. The artist, her friend Paul Heber-Percy, used Photoshop, then a pencil and tracing paper, to reverse and multiply the image of her face, until he had a drawing, neatly laid out on a grid, that satisfied him.

2023 / Other Books Highlights From This Year II

Megan Fernandes

2023

Other Books Highlights From This Year II

Throughout the year, Vulture maintained a “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” list. Many of those selections appear above in our top-ten. Below, the rest of the books that stood out to them this year, presented in order of release date.

I Hear You’re Rich, by Diane Williams

You might call Diane Williams’s plots dreamlike — they proceed according to their own mysterious logic, interrupting themselves — but they’re not hazy. Her voice is declarative, even blunt. Her narrators make forceful assertions about household objects and uncouth remarks at dinner parties. If her super-short stories are surprising, even shocking, her style is always reliable. Since the ’90s, Williams — who started writing in middle age — has worked to turn the everyday stuff of realist fiction into props for existential fun houses. Like her other collections, So I Hear You’re Rich will please fans of Lydia Davis and David Lynch. —M.C

2018, as picked by writers / Part two

 Illustration: Jennifer Tapias Derch

2018, as picked by writers – part two

Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays

Saturday 7 July 2018

Lara Feigel

This is a brilliant summer for books by women: novels, memoirs and poems that address the difficult questions in women’s lives from an intimate perspective, but also with an unsentimental, distancing acuity and a preparedness to invent new forms for writing and for living. Three that seem to speak to each other in this respect are Deborah Levy’s game-changing The Cost of Living (Hamish Hamilton), Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (Faber) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (Harvill Secker). I also love Kathyrn Maris’s new poetry collection The House With Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin), which tackles motherhood and family life with a comic thoughtfulness that’s unusually open to cruelty and that can rise and fall easily between the heroic and the bathetic. And right now, the book that’s really gripping me, and making me start again in thinking about many things, is Silver Press’s reprint of Nell Dunn’s 1965 Talking to Women, a series of artfully transcribed conversations with 10 of her friends. What’s striking, reading this, is how much has changed but also how little. And, unusually, the lack of change doesn’t feel depressing, reading these interviews, because there’s a pleasure in feeling so connected to these women across the decades. Also, there’s a kind of satisfaction in feeling that it’s just as important to keep asking the questions she asked about how we live, and why, and it makes me grateful that we have Cusk and Heti and Levy and Maris still asking them.

Aminatta Forna

In Calypso (Little, Brown), David Sedaris’s essays marry meditations on family, suicide, grief and mortality with the hazards of bodily functions and frequent travel for his massively popular public readings. Sedaris is as much standup comic as writer, making this a great audio and one for the car journey. I’m currently reading The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, highly relevant in this fourth wave feminism moment and quietly gripping. I shall also be packing What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (Tinder) by Lesley Nneka Arimah, whose New Yorker short stories I have enjoyed. Tsitsi Dangaremba’s This Mournable Body (Graywolf) isn’t out until August, but I shall read it before summer’s end.

Mohsin Hamid

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile (Penguin) really made me think about how I think. I am also rereading Homer’s Iliad (the Robert Fitzgerald translation) and making my way through Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World (Norton).

Yuval Noah Harari

The Road to Unfreedom (Bodley Head) by Timothy Snyder is a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, Europe and the US in the second decade of the 21st century. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world.

In Enlightenment Now (Allen Lane), Steven Pinker extols the amazing achievements of modernity, and demonstrates that humankind has never been so peaceful, healthy and prosperous. There is of course much to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting.

Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, will be published on 30 August by Jonathan Cape.

David Hare

I’m sure Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is going to be great – at least if The Flamethrowers is anything to go by. In Ma’am Darling, 99 Excerpts from the Life of Princess Margaret (4th Estate), Craig Brown achieves the impossible by finding a tone in which to write about monarchy. Not bitchy, not snide, not angry, but not fawning nor deferential either. Just funny.

Jess Kidd

I am rollicking through Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, which is one of the funniest, most twisted and freshest things I’ve read in a long time. It follows the fortunes of Mona, who cleans houses and falls for a man she calls Mr Disgusting. Beagin combines deep compassion and irreverent humour to create characters with nasty, wonderful, human flaws. Helen Barrell’s Fatal Evidence, Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor and the Dawn of Forensic Science is an engrossing read. It follows the career of Taylor, a remarkable scientist who gave evidence at the trial of William Palmer, “The Rugeley Poisoner”, pioneered the study of forensic medicine and let Charles Dickens nose around his laboratory. Barrell explores Taylor’s (occassionally bizarre) cases, his public and private persona and his wide-ranging interests, which included geology and photography. Her description of the ways in which forensic experiments evolved is as fascinating as the courtroom dramas they accompanied.

Deborah Levy

Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver) collects Audre Lorde’s essays and poems together for the first time in the UK. I look forward to getting stuck in to Talking to Women, Nell Dunn’s 1964 conversation about sex, money, work and art with a group of friends – including the writer Ann Quin and pop artist Pauline Boty.

My love affair with the explosive, erotic, modernist poetry of Apollinaire is the one enduring passion in my life. Many of his best poems were written when he was a soldier fighting on the front lines in WW1. It was Apollinaire who invented the word, Surrealist. In Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (NYRB), Ron Padgett’s translation from the French (Padgett wrote the poems for the bus driver poet in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson) is pitch perfect and dazzling.

I will also reread four books I initially read very fast, mostly because the skill of the writing itself is the main event in all of them: The Years by Annie Ernaux, Kudos by Rachel Cusk, The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg (Daunt, translated by Dick Davis) and Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (Faber).

Hilary Mantel

If you have not already met The Secret Barrister (Macmillan), he or she makes an entertaining and acerbic holiday companion for those who don’t switch off their brains in summer; it seems our resource-starved legal system is poised on the brink of not working at all. Tessa Hadley’s short stories, Bad Dreams (Cape), are simple and artful and leave you wanting more. Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims (Allen Lane, translated by Michael Lucey) is a haunting book, fiercely political and deeply personal; I shall be thinking about it this summer and for many seasons to come.

Paul Mason

Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism (Verso) is influencing left parties as they enter government, from Greece to Portugal to Mexico. It is a beach-sized introduction to a major left thinker of the 21st century. Mike Davis’s Old Gods, New Enigmas (Verso) is a challenging re-exploration of Marx in the light of the atomisation of class struggle, the climate crisis and the centrality of cities to social justice struggles. Patrick Langley’s debut novel Arkady comes beautifully presented by Fitzcarraldo. What’s not to like about a book where revolutionaries take over a city in the north of England?

THE GUARDIAN

21 Books You Should Read This July / Part two

 

Dave Eggers

21 Books You Should Read This July 

PART TWO

We Asked Lit Hub Contributors About What They're Looking Forward To

JULY 1, 2016

Underground Airlines, Ben H. Winters (Mulholland)

No spoilers, no bullshit, no doubt it will blow your mind.

–Lisa Levy (Lit Hub contributing editor)

Hot Milk, Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury)

I’m not sure if I fully understand Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk yet, but I’m sure I’ll keep trying to—and I’m sure it will keep haunting me as I puzzle out narrator Sofia, her mother Rose, her sometime lovers, and her very young, breastfeeding stepmother. Sofia and Rose are in southern Spain seeking a cure for Rose’s mysterious illness with a doctor who is part genius, part charlatan, and part shaman. As Sofia batters her way towards mature identity, the reader batters her way towards meaning. It’s unforgettable and complex and oh, there are jellyfish, too.

–Bethanne Patrick (Lit Hub Contributing Editor)

Heroes of the Frontier, Dave Eggers (Knopf)

For quite a while I’d been wondering what Dave Eggers would do next—would it be a magazine, a small press, an app offering a new kind of digital reading experience with bells and whistles? I am excited that it’s a new novel and that, continuing with his eclectic array of themes, he’s setting Heroes of the Frontier in Alaska, where the female protagonist flees with her kids without telling her ex-husband. An Eggers family road trip in the bleak wilderness? Yes please.

–Marta Bausells (Lit Hub contributor)

The Big Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage)

When it comes to massive and comprehensive anthologies focused on a specific strain of fiction, the editorial team of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer has set the bar remarkably high. Their new anthology, The Big Book of Science Fiction covers a wide range of styles and authors, including a number of works in translation (among them, stories from Cixin Liu, Silvina Ocampo, and Leena Krohn).

–Tobias Carroll (Lit Hub contributor)

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, D.G. Compton (NYRB)

In this dystopian moment, why run from the horror? Let us rather sink into it, learn its capacities, its weaknesses. Let us prepare through literature. Enter The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton. It is the near future, one in which death has essentially been abolished. The few exceptions are filmed for Human Destiny, a television program-cum-death documentary commanding an enormous, ravenous audience. When Katherine learns she has weeks to live, she proves unwilling to embrace her macabre celebrity. But Roddie, a new kind of program host, a man with surgical implants whose eyes transmit his vision to the screen, knows the show must go on. An eerie, prophetic look at shrinking privacy, intrusive technology, and the ethics of ambition.

–Dustin Illingworth (Lit Hub contributor)

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, Blair Braverman (Ecco)

Growing up, I loved to read stories (whether fiction or nonfiction) set in frozen landscapes. Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf are just two books that come to mind. That’s why I’m particularly excited to read Blair Braverman’s debut memoir. The author spent time in Norway, where she learned how to be a musher, and Alaska, where she gave tours on a glacier. Adrian Nicole Leblanc says it’s “a delicate meditation from the frontiers of feminism, forged by the stark landscapes that prompted it.”

–Michele Filgate (Lit Hub Contributing Editor)

 

Object Lessons: Bread, Hair, Password, Questionnaire (Bloomsbury)

I love micro-histories and the surprising insight that comes from in-depth meditations on the seemingly mundane.That is why it’s no shock that last year I fell in love with the Object Lessons series of books put out by Bloomsbury and The Atlantic Monthly. They’re small, usually less than 30,000 words, and beautifully designed. Next month there will be four new additions—Bread by Scott Shershow, Hair by Scott Lowe, Password by Martin Paul Eve, and Questionnaire by Evan Kindley. (Full disclosure: I liked these books so much that I pitched one, High Heel, which will be published in 2017).

–Summer Brennan (Lit Hub contributor,
author of The Oyster War)

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