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Philippa Snow
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including ArtforumThe Los Angeles Review of BooksArtReviewFriezeVogueThe NationThe New Statesman, and The New Republic. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater, and she is currently working on an essay collection about famous women.  

Articles Available Online


You Don’t Think God Is Sexy?

Film Review

January 2023

Philippa Snow

Film Review

January 2023

On the most literal level, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie Teorema (1968) is about an entire family being driven to distraction by their...

Essay

Issue No. 31

It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me

Philippa Snow

Essay

Issue No. 31

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped...

There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names The ability to inventory the flora of an imagined terrain, especially with local variants, is often taken as a sign of novelistic prowess: where, in postmodernism’s wake, pretence to interior knowledge falters, knowledge of surface takes over When Cormac McCarthy guides his readers around the southern states of America, he can sometimes seem more a botanist than a novelist, so lacking are his novels in interiority and abundant in the common names of flowers When Michael Pietsch arranged the fragments of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King for publication, he naturally placed at the beginning an unlocated paragraph describing a landscape that features an extensive, incantatory list of obscure plant names: ‘shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimsonweed,’ and on it goes Philip Roth once playfully suggested he should give up writing because, as he put it, ‘I don’t even know the names of the trees’ Names are knowledge, the logic might suggest, and knowledge is mastery Though we might mourn the loss of these languages from our lives, and though this kind of writing might prompt us to redress that loss, to the average reader, in the immediate term, a parade of plant names like Wallace’s can be like nonsense verse: the words are interesting for their shape, their weight, their buoyancy, but they call no image into being It can thus look like a kind of peacocking: a florid display of the writer’s close attention to the world that disempowers the reader’s imagination Looked at another way, however, the effect becomes a metonym for the condition of fiction: with the writer as our guide, we look both at and away from the world   Christine Schutt understands more than most fiction’s necessary imbrication of things, names and ways of seeing – that, in other words, there is no objective gaze Of the eleven stories in her fertile, dense and blooming new collection, Pure Hollywood (her first to be published in the UK), five feature gardeners prominently There are as

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, Vogue, The...

Essay

January 2021

An Uneasy Girl

Philippa Snow

Essay

January 2021

Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are...

Brilliant Muscles

Essay

December 2019

Philippa Snow

Essay

December 2019

‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film,’ I told almost everyone I spoke to for about two months earlier this year, ‘is about werewolf detectives.’ Nobody seemed...
Evita Vasiljeva, POSTCRETE

Art Review

February 2019

Philippa Snow

Art Review

February 2019

Lower.Green is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich. It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre:...
Gabriele Beveridge, Live Dead World

Art Review

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Art Review

November 2018

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane...

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feature

Issue No. 8

Barking From the Margins: On écriture féminine

Lauren Elkin

feature

Issue No. 8

 I. Two moments in May May 2, 2011. The novelists Siri Hustvedt and Céline Curiol are giving a talk...

Interview

July 2013

Interview with Paul Muldoon

Alice Whitwham

Interview

July 2013

A major figure in English-language poetry for decades, Paul Muldoon has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of...

Interview

Issue No. 8

Interview with Sophie Calle

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 8

Sophie Calle is France’s most celebrated conceptual artist. Her highly autobiographical, multi-disciplinary work combines the confessional and the cerebral,...

 

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