Bradley Strotten

A review of The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda, 288 pages, Arcade Publishing (May 2025) In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s not feelings of personal injury and past trauma that we mine for poetic inspiration, it’s the archives of the canon.

DispatchDogsFight dogsRural EnglandSocietyUKXl BullyXL Bully ban ‚ÄúVast!‚ÄĚ Jason shouted, which means fix in place, ‚ÄúVast!‚ÄĚ. And a muscled black-and-tan Malinois with titanium-coated k9s locked on to my left arm. It was an otherwise quiet afternoon in Kentish suburbia. In a woods tucked away from the Barratt Homes and play park, I stood in a bite suit, pressed against a tree, as my old friend Jason shouted instructions at Trigger ‚ÄĒ his ‚Äúak47 on a leash‚ÄĚ.

A review of We Do Not Part by Han Kang, 272 pages, Hogarth (February 2025) “Here they come,” wrote Kingsley Amis of Colin Wilson’s debut book, the bold existentialist anthology, The Outsiders, “tramp, tramp, tramp—all those characters you thought were discredited, or had never read, or (if you are like me) had never heard of: Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Tolstoy [and] Dostoevsky.” This was textbook Amis.