For the first time this year, The White Review Poet’s Prize was open to poets based anywhere in the world. Last month we announced a shortlist of eight poets. ...
The White Review hosts a screening of Powell & Pressburger’s Gone To Earth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Thursday 25 October The film will be introduced by writer and critic Brian Dillon Please visit the ICA website to book a seat for the screening
Gone to Earth is based on Mary Webb’s melodramatic novel of 1917: the tale of a wild-natured young woman (played by Jennifer Jones) torn between the love of a meek Baptist minister (Cyril Cusack) and the local squire (David Farrar) Several of Powell and Pressburger’s better known films — especially A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going — are in thrall to a mystical view of British landscape In Gone to Earth, that magic and Romanticism are weirdly lurid and over-stated; the film imputes an absurd degree of eroticism and energy to the Shropshire countryside where it was shot It’s an oddity, even an embarrassment, among Powell and Pressburger’s films – compromised by co-producer David O Selznick’s obsessive relationship with Jones But at a time when so many British artists and writers — from Tacita Dean to Robert Macfarlane — are revisiting Romantic conceptions of landscape, it’s also a fascinating instance of a postwar picturesque Dir Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK 1950, 110 mins, Cert PG
Brian Dillon is a writer and critic, and UK editor of Cabinet magazineHe contributes regularly to art magazines, newspapers and journals in the UK, USA and Ireland, as well as writing books that range in subject matter from contemporary art to the history of hypochondria, the physical space of writing to the aesthetics of decay
Mythos Berlin is a new book published by The White Review in collaboration with the German Embassy London A series of essays, interviews and analyses explore the reputation of Berlin as a cultural capital since the fall of the Wall
Please contact or Susanne Schulze or Margaretha Weber at presse@londdiplode to RSVP for the launch
On a rare visit to London, novelist and critic Joshua Cohen will be reading from a novella, ‘Sent’, at contemporary art gallery Carroll/Fletcher during Frieze week
‘Sent’ begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who’ve starred in all the internet porn he’s ever enjoyed
Following the reading, Cohen will be interviewed by Christian Lorentzen, Senior Editor at the London Review of Books There will be alcohol (& soft drinks, too) Space is limited to 60 people for this event so please RSVP BY EMAIL ONLY to editors [at] thewhiterevieworg The event will begin at 7pm
Joshua Cohen is the author of the novels Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto A book of novellas, Four New Messages, was published by Graywolf Press in August 2012, and an essay on the history of attention is forthcoming with Notting Hill Editions in 2013 Cohen is the New Books critic for Harper’s Magazine He lives in New York City
‘Joshua Cohen has more than four new messages to deliver in this volatile book, all quite urgent These stories seize us with their brash humor and intellectual reach But are they startling warning flares or diabolical soul traps? Probably both Read them and weep, roar, shudder’—Sam Lipsyte, praise for Four New Messages
‘This anarchic energy recalls Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but what really distinguishes Witz is its language and Cohen’s vigorous assault on the sentence as a unit of simple communication A linguistic extravaganza’—The New York Times Book Review, praise for Witz
For those of you who missed our August launch event at the Wapping Project Bankside, we will be holding another launch event for The White Review No 5 on Friday 7 September in the Gallery at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, from 630-830pm Four days before the Booker shortlist is announced, longlisted novelist Ned Beauman will be joining us to read from The Teleportation Accident Faber & Faber poet Sam Riviere, whose debut collection 81 Austerities has just been released to great critical acclaim, will also read some of his new work Both will answer questions from the editors and audience thereafter
There will be wine, or some other form of alcoholic beverage (get in touch if you would like to provide said beverage by way of sponsorship) We will then be repairing to the Phoenix Artist Club from 830pm, across the road from Foyles (Password for entry: The White Review)
Please RSVP for this event by emailing editors@thewhiterevieworg Space is limited for this event
The White Review launches its fifth issue featuring new fiction, essays, poetry, artwork and interviews with Ben Marcus and Hans Ulrich Obrist We’ll be celebrating the launch at Wapping Project Bankside, next to Tate Modern, from 630pm – 830pm on Thursday 9 August
Please RSVP at editors@thewhiterevieworg or through Facebook as space is limited There will be a list on the door There will also be wine And copies of The White Review No 5 The party will relocate to a nearby pub as of 830pm, where it will continue until late
The White Review takes a stand at Copeland Book Market from Thursday 19 – Sunday 22 July The location is Bold Tendencies Sculpture Park, Peckham We’ll be hosting a reading by Granta ‘New Poet’ Caleb Klaces, winner of the Eric Gregory Award, at 330pm on Sunday Visit wwwcopelandbookmarketcom for more details
Thursday (Launch) 18:00 — 21:00; Friday 16:00 — 21:00; Saturday & Sunday 12:00 — 18:00
Editors Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard will be interviewing writer, editor and critic Brian Dillon at the Hackney Bureau, 3 Mare Street, London E8 4RP on 6 June from 7pm
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet and Tutor in Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art He is the author of Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), I Am Sitting in a Room (Cabinet, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005) Dillon writes regularly for Artforum, frieze, Art Review, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Wire A collection of his essays, Culture and Curiosity, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2012
There will be wine
Space is limited for this event Please RSVP by email only at editors [at] thewhiterevieworg
The White Review celebrates the life and work of William S Burroughs in an evening of conversation and sound in collaboration with the Counterculture department at Maggs Bros, London Featuring a presentation by Charlie Fox on Burroughs’ spoken word recordings (expect clips of Joyce, Beckett and Public Enemy too), an interview with Barry Miles (biographer of Burroughs, as well as Bukowski, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lennon and Zappa), and a conversation between Ian MacFadyen (co-editor of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays) and Terry Wilson (whose interviews with Brion Gysin were collected as Here to Go: Planet R-101)
Please email editors@thewhiterevieworg to reserve a space RSVP essential The event starts at 730pm, and Maggs Bros is at 50 Berkeley Square (nearest tube: Green Park or Bond St)
Deborah Levy, whose short story ‘Weeping Machines’ was published in issue four of The White Review, will be reading from her latest novel, Swimming Home, at Shakespeare & Co, Paris on Monday 7 May from 730pm You can read an extract from the novel in our Fiction section TWR editor Benjamin Eastham will be interviewing her on stage after the reading All welcome
John Holten’s debut novel The Readymades uses and abuses a number of literary genres: found texts from the history of modern art, witness testimonies, press releases and the narrative style of art-historical accounts The novel emerges from one of Félix Fénéon’s infamous three-sentence ‘novels’ – appropriated mini-stories from French newspapers – and from the starting point of Fénéon’s narrative readymade, Holten has extrapolated a whole missing art movement and their contemporary European picaresque saga
The action begins during October 2008 in Paris, with John, a young Irish publisher, meeting the jaded Serbian artist Djordje Bojić Bojić tells John about the manuscript he is writing: the history of the LGB Group – an Eastern European neo-avant-garde collective that arose in the turbulent environment of mid-1990s Belgrade, when Bojić and his friends, recently returned from the war in Bosnia, started to produce art in order to escape the hysterical nationalism all around them
Bojić’s manuscript makes up the final part of the novel Starting out as an academic attempt to document the LGB Group, the sober attitude of the art-historical account soon collapses, and the narrative gradually turns into a disclosing life-story of violence and existential decay As the manuscript moves closer to the horrific truths of Bojić’s own war experiences, the testimony gradually fails, becomes full of mute lacunas in order to finally reach the ineffable climax of the testimony: the aphasia of trauma, the dumbness of loss, and the ultimate silence of Bojić’s own death
By juxtaposing the experience of war, the urge for artistic creation and the act of narrating the past, The Readymades launches a double strategy in which the artistic gesture becomes an attempt to overcome war, while simultaneously forced to partake in it Because art (at least since the original Dada gesture) has sought its own raison d’être in an ongoing dialectic of defiance, transgression and negation of the status quo, it must inevitably find its own dynamic intrinsically linked to acts of violence
With a unique
