Erica Wagner
New Statesman
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Past articles by Erica:
Eleanor Catton and the problem with “literary thrillers”
Her new novel raises the question: is the genre code for a thriller that simply isn’t very thrilling? → Read More
Eleanor Catton and the problem with “literary thrillers”
Her new novel raises the question: is the genre code for a thriller that simply isn’t very thrilling? → Read More
TS Eliot: After The Waste Land review: how the author found happiness
Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s second marriage transformed his life. → Read More
Erica Wagner: The ghost stories that haunted my childhood
A book – a hardback, bound in clear plastic – which I read, and then read again, feeling that fluttering sense of wonder and terror that the best horror brings. → Read More
Everyone and no one belongs to New York
I am a New Yorker. I’ve lived in Britain for more than 35 years and in London for a quarter century. But New York is my hometown; New York is my soul. It’s been nearly two years, however, since I’ve sniffed the subway’s distinctive perfume or gazed at the starry roof of Grand Central Station; two years since I’ve eaten wontons from White Bear in the Flushing neighbourhood of → Read More
Remembering Anthony Thwaite
The life and legacy of the poet and New Statesman literary editor, who has died at the age of 90. → Read More
Paul Kingsnorth and the new climate fiction
Alexandria falls into the now well-established genre of “cli-fi” novels: dystopias that engage directly with the hell we are calling upon ourselves as temperatures rise and ice melts. → Read More
David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue: a band Bildungsroman in the Swinging Sixties
The novel begins in 1967, in the clubs of London's psychedelic music scene, as the band find their groove amid the cultural revolution of the 1960s. → Read More
Rediscovering “Paris” by Hope Mirrlees, modernism’s lost classic
Paris was first published one hundred years ago by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press – two years before TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. → Read More
The ship aground
We have come over Tower Bridge over the river’s silver over basculed stone, steel and we have curved, curled toward St Saviour’s Dock, where monks walked, where Sikes fell, where now the narrow streets are silent in sunlight in high blue where old poverty meets new money where I am newly free on two wheels new swift curling, curving over cobble and tarmac past the brick-built pub just up from… → Read More
Unlike One Day, David Nicholls’s Sweet Sorrow is a novel full of missed opportunities
While there’s nothing wrong with the tale of a summer romance, it feels as if Nicholls is playing it safe. → Read More
Deadwood: The Movie concludes the bloodiest, sweariest, most swaggering Western there ever was
Real feeling lies underneath the shocking vulgarity of the show’s language. → Read More
Brand Easton Ellis
The author of American Psycho is back on the publicity trail, courting controversy and selling his “vision”. But what – if anything – does he really believe in? → Read More
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland takes us to the catacombs and beyond
This is a startling and memorable book, charting invisible and vanishing worlds. → Read More
Why Ali Smith is the national novelist we need
On the evening of 27 March, two days before the UK was due to leave the EU, 100 or so people crammed into the London Review Bookshop, waiting in pin-drop silence for Ali Smith to read. That evening, the novelist launched Spring, the third volume of the seasonal quartet of books which began with Autumn, published shortly after the 2016 Leave vote. That book has often been → Read More
Dialogues with the dead: a harrowing new novel from Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End is a short, ruthlessly heartbreaking book. → Read More
Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife is a pleasingly weird modern take on Beowulf
The novel is not a retelling of that great old tale, but rather a playful reconsideration, an invitation to look at its characters from a different perspective. → Read More
Charles Frazier’s Varina is a novel of clear-eyed, eloquent sympathy
A flawed novel, but a fascinating one all the same. → Read More
Perfidious Albion is a spookily prescient take on Brexit Britain
This novel is set in the near future, in a Britain that has finally, absolutely broken free from the imagined shackles of the EU → Read More
John Edgar Wideman: the voice of America’s great divide
From the Civil War to the prison industrial complex, Wideman’s work considers the bitter legacy of slavery. → Read More