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Orlando Reade

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can be read in The White Review No. 13.



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Wildness of the Day

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December 2016

Orlando Reade

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December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier that year a canopy of...

Interview

Issue No. 13

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

Interview

Issue No. 13

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects. Philosophers have discovered in love a lived...

‘Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!’ cries one character in Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!, playfully referring to her own non-existence There is art that projects itself as real, that replaces the reader’s rational world with one that is imagined and invented, and asks everyone to play along And then there is art – like Nabokov’s – that rebels against reality, that draws attention to its own artifice and unreal-ness C D Rose’s latest work belongs to this latter category, and is a refreshing example of literary play done well   I liked this book And I liked liking it, basking in its twee, timeless, self-conscious world An English professor is invited to give a series of lectures in an unnamed central European city on the subject of forgotten books, following the success of his book The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure — the title of Rose’s own previous work, published in 2014 This brief interruption of fact within fiction occurs in chapter one, as if to invite the reader to prepare for a sojourn in the supernatural   The name of the city, we are told, is unimportant, but we’re placed in a Kafka-esque urban environment, somewhere between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, where the newspapers contain ‘disturbingly few vowels in their mastheads’ and where Liberation Square and Revolution Square are regularly confused In a kind of Truman Show reality, the professor’s world is peopled by few but all too-deliberate characters: the crazed taxi driver-cum-personal chauffeur in his orange football shirt and ‘80s Lada; the pair of identical non-same-sex twins Ono and Ana, who interchangeably serve as the professor’s assistant and whose palindromic names amplify their malleable identity; and the permanently performing performance artist Squattrinato, who appears to have parachuted straight from the final act of a Pirandello play without removing his make-up The town is also the resting place of the professor’s favourite writer Guyavitch (who allegedly never existed) – ‘Guy’ alluding to everybody and therefore nobody In sum, they create a world not of people, but characters, who serve knowingly to position the novel as a feat

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette...

Life outside the Manet Paradise Resort : On the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

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November 2012

Orlando Reade

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November 2012

*   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a high street studio portrait photographer:...

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Prize Entry

April 2015

I Told You...

Owen Booth

Prize Entry

April 2015

1. The Triumph of Capitalism   It was the end of the cold war and capitalism had won. Everywhere...

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Issue No. 6

The White Review No. 6 Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 6

By the looks of it, not much has changed for The White Review. This new edition, like its predecessors,...

fiction

April 2013

Popular Mechanics

Gareth Dickson

fiction

April 2013

In simple terms, the process of combustion creates energy that is converted into motion. The ignition by the spark...

 

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