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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...

In the summer of 2008, the English novelist Hari Kunzru left London for New York City after accepting a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers With three novels under his belt, Kunzru was already considering his fourth: ‘My intention was to write a book set in sixteenth-century India,’ he told me, ‘but it totally fell apart as soon as I got to New York I just couldn’t concentrate on anything that wasn’t set in America’ He confessed his difficulty to some friends who happened to be planning a road trip to Joshua Tree, who invited him along   The novel that Kunzru eventually wrote, Gods Without Men (2011), was steeped in the lore and culture of the Mojave Desert, where UFOs, cults, sacred Indian sites, peyote visions and burnt-out rock stars blend together to create a mesmerising love letter to his newly adopted country When it was published, however, American culture was entering a crisis A far right movement had emerged in opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency Two years later, Black Lives Matter was born after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin   Around this time, Kunzru, now a full-time New York resident with an American wife – the novelist Katie Kitamura – and two Brooklyn-born kids, began working on a novel about the blues For research, Kunzru travelled with a group of music writers to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains to visit Chris King, a noted collector of vintage records The group sat around drinking bourbon as King spun one ancient track after another, sharing with them both his archive of music and his vast knowledge of it – though he would demur from sharing too many of the records’ secrets   A similar scene is described in White Tears (2017), Kunzru’s newly published novel and first major work since Gods Without Men It tells of two white music producers who ingeniously fake their own antique blues track, only to be told by an eccentric record aficionado that they’ve happened upon an actual tune recorded by a long lost blues musician This discovery is the first tug on a string

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...

READ NEXT

poetry

July 2011

Letter of a Madman

Guy de Maupassant

TR. Will Stone

poetry

July 2011

Introduction by the translator In the early hours of 2 January 1892, sensing the approach of insanity, the renowned...

poetry

October 2013

Steam

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

Steam in the changing rooms, stripping off after the race, breathes like an engine. The air is filled up...

poetry

Issue No. 17

Winter Diary

Galina Rymbu

TR. Joan Brooks

poetry

Issue No. 17

who bravely blasts their breath through the horn flares of gloomy streets, into dripping construction trailers, dropped by the...

 

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