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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, M John Harrison argued that the segregation of literature into genres is ‘a marketing device that got out of hand’ The complaint is a familiar one among genre authors It is also legitimate Junot Díaz – himself a ‘literary’ author whose work is often infused with a deep respect for science fiction and fantasy – has provocatively described genre fiction as ‘the third world’ of contemporary literature The ‘privileged’ world of literary fiction, Díaz believes, treats genre writers ‘unfairly’, rarely affording them the ‘serious reading’ they deserve Harrison has certainly been read seriously, if not as widely as he deserves Angela Carter, China Miéville, Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane are among those who have praised the disquieting clarity of his prose, as well as his restless inventiveness In the Guardian interview, Harrison said that his fiction emerges, in part, as an act of defiance against the limitations of genre He wants to ‘undermine’ the market-hardened borders of genre fiction; to ‘ask what [a genre is] afraid of, what it’s trying to hide – then write that’   You Should Come With Me Now, a new collection of short stories, cements his reputation as a master of what Mark Fisher has termed the ‘weird and the eerie’ The stories – which range in length from flash-fictional paragraphs to haunting, hypnotic tales unfolding over several pages – reflect Harrison’s desire to excavate the disturbing stuff that lurks on the underbelly of genre or at the dark limits of literary fiction There are astral-projecting aliens ‘extruded from a space that wasn’t quite the world’ There’s a vision of Britain occupied by foreign powers and rebranded as ‘Autotelia’ There are magical-seeming edgelands that throb, like the ‘zone’ in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with buried secrets and inexplicable life These conceits might sound a little outlandish in summary Yet they are anchored throughout by the kinds of resolutely concrete, descriptive ‘residues’ – brand names, physical textures, particular clothing – that Barthes identified as creating ‘the reality effect’ of literature There are references to Duck & Waffle restaurants, the M25, the Shard, ‘a Nikon 775 digital

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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poetry

October 2013

Transylvania

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

The rabbit darkness just beyond the headlights’ sprawl and parcel darkness stopping up the drivers’ mouths like oaths or...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Pylons

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2017

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt....

Interview

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

 

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