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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...

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone in charge, someone who understood how it all fitted together? Even though we know that it isn’t possible, perhaps some part of us still longs for a real-life omniscient narrator That’s part of the appeal of big, bold, transdisciplinary books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitle: ‘A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’), and, most recently, of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbusting Sapiens, published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014 Sapiens has sold over a million copies and garnered praise from big hitters as diverse as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Chris Evans and Lily Cole Five years on, it’s still a best-seller: Number 23 in Amazon’s overall books ranking, and Number 1 in several smaller categories such as ‘Civilisation and Culture’ According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales across the book market, it sold over 300,000 copies in 2018 and ranked twelfth in the year’s bestsellers Homo Deus followed, published in English in 2016; its sales figures were approaching the 1 million mark when Harari’s latest offering, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, appeared in August last year   Sapiens has a Diamond-esque, humblebrag subtitle – ‘A Brief History of Humankind’ – and sure enough, Harari thanks Diamond in his acknowledgements for teaching him ‘to see the big picture’ It’s true that his canvas is about as broad as they come, covering 6 million years of human history and finishing up with a squint at the future All that compressed into 500 pages makes for compelling reading Sapiens is full of exhilarating leaps and breezy swoops and gloriously eclectic statistics and anecdotes And even when you feel dissent rise up – at some over-confident assertion unsupported by evidence – it feels churlish and nit-picking to object Shouldn’t we be applauding the sheer scale and daring of the project?   *   In 2016, I visited Salt Lake City with my mother During our holiday, several young Mormons attempted to convert us Many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of the

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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Art

May 2012

Art's Fading Sway: Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov

Scott Esposito

Art

May 2012

I have often fallen asleep in small theatres. It is an embarrassing thing to have happen during one-man shows,...

Prize Entry

April 2015

The Incidental

Luke Melia

Prize Entry

April 2015

The automatic rifle fire was followed by an unnerving whistle at Ti’s ear. He gripped the shopping bags, grabbed...

fiction

March 2017

A Table is a Table

Peter Bichsel

TR. Lydia Davis

fiction

March 2017

I want to tell a story about an old man, a man who no longer says a word, has...

 

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