Surrealism
Never Anyone But You, by Rupert Thomson reviewed
In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world.…
It’s the thought that counts
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
Repo women
Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering…
Short and surreal
‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected journalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection…
Thinking inside the box
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
What’s to become of Pedro Friedeberg’s letters?
Duncan Fallowell on the elusive Mexican artist and man-of-letters who has been his friend and faithful correspondent over many years — though they have never met
The true flower of dawn
Leonora Carrington is one of those jack-in-the-boxes who languish forgotten in the cultural toy cupboard and then pop up every…
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
In the shadow of Guernica
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
Layers of meaning
An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel…
The sound of nervous laughter
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
