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Izabella Scott

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.



Articles Available Online


Shola von Reinhold’s ‘LOTE’

Book Review

September 2020

Izabella Scott

Book Review

September 2020

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. It tells the story of a queer Black...

Art Review

November 2019

Actually, the Dead are Not Dead

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2019

During Bergen Assembly’s opening days, I am asked to attend a number of mock funerals, including one for a...

Due to our destructive behaviour, writer EO Wilson foresaw humanity soon entering the Eremocene – the ‘Age of Loneliness’ This fresh hell would be plagued by an environment void of the many forms of life we see and take for granted today, and, for us humans, result in existential and material isolation Perhaps it already feels this way Maybe we’ve discreetly slipped into the Eremocene without much fanfare It does seem sadly fitting that Wilson passed away at the end of 2021, a year overshadowed by isolation, and that we seem to be burning our way closer to a fully realised Age of Loneliness Also fitting is the appearance of Missouri Williams’s debut novel The Doloriad; a nihilistic fictional diorama into which she places her characters and watches them suffer      The Doloriad opens with a palpable sense of dread and a shimmering blackness in the language (The first chapter is appropriately titled ‘Prolegomena to Future Agonies’) Dolores, who is mute and has no legs, is stuffed in a wheelbarrow and pushed into the forest by her uncle, who is also her father She is soon abandoned as a marriage offering to a potential group of distant humans on the horizon If this feels too grim from the get-go, it’s not, because Williams is an intelligent stylist, deftly unfolding energetic prose reliant on her powerfully strange imagery: ‘Their uncle shuffled along with his unwieldy burden and the cracked lenses of his glasses repelled the sun; the light bounced away from him, splintering into new delusions, and those bright disks, fixed to the head and the long, dry stick of his body, gave him the appearance of a watchtower on the move’ It’s gorgeous stuff, weird and dark, more Thomas Bernhard and Deafheaven than Chuck Palahniuk and Korn   The bulk of the novel concerns a massive inbred family overseen by the Matriarch soon after a cataclysmic event that has left the world barren, except for a few birds, insects, a poisoned river and the ‘unbearable whiteness of the new chemical sky’ There’s Jan, Agathe, Marta, Mary, Adam, Jakub, legless Dolores

Contributor

September 2015

Izabella Scott

Contributor

September 2015

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.

Book Review

August 2019

Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’

Izabella Scott

Book Review

August 2019

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century...

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Echo Chamber

Art Review

November 2017

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2017

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze. Artist Navine G....
Hot Rocks

feature

November 2016

Izabella Scott

feature

November 2016

‘We have received around 150 of them,’ Massimo Osanna tells me, as we peer into four small crates stuffed full of dusty freezer bags....
False shadows

Art

August 2016

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis...

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Interview

October 2014

Interview with Jem Cohen

Steve Macfarlane

Interview

October 2014

Jem Cohen may be one of the quintessential New York filmmakers of our era. Peerless in his knack for...

Art

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

fiction

April 2014

by Accident

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic...

 

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