BOOK OF THE WEEK
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe by Stephen Greenblatt (Bodley Head)
When Stephen Greenblatt was asked by the screenwriter Marc Norman to help with his Shakespeare project, he advised him to give it up and focus on Marlowe instead. Norman did OK in the end – Shakespeare in Love, co-written with Tom Stoppard – won seven Oscars. But the question remains: why has nobody made a Marlowe biopic? Already the subject of a great novel – Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford – his life has everything needed for a big-screen treatment: ambition, talent, political dissent, sexual adventures, espionage, and a neat dramatic arc. He did not fade away but burned out, stabbed to death in a drinking establishment in Deptford, aged 29. Greenblatt’s new biography, reviewed by the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, brings Kit Marlowe and the whole world of Elizabethan theatre to life with dazzling clarity. Read the review | Order the book
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Fiction
Vaim by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
In Vaim, the Norwegian writer’s first novel since winning the 2023 Nobel prize in literature, we wash up on the island home of elderly boatman Jatgeir, a place of islets, fjords, small boats and passive, bewildered male inhabitants. With an added splash of black humour, this novel – the first in a planned trilogy – is warmer than some of Fosse’s earlier work, but no less intricate, strange and pleasurable, writes the prize-winning novelist Eimear McBride. Read the review | Order the book
Nonfiction
Sanderling by Anne Weber, translated by Neil Blackadder (The Indigo Press)
At the heart of this complex family memoir lies a troubling question: how could Weber’s grandfather, a German Protestant cleric who moved in intellectual circles – a friend of Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Hugo von Hofmannsthal – raise a son who became a Nazi? Lucy Popescu’s forthcoming review describes Weber’s book as a searing exploration of identity, ethics, faith and inherited guilt. Order the book
Chris Power’s paperback of the week
The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston (Penguin)
Will we one day, as Liam Gallagher once promised, be able to live for ever? The Australian neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston thinks so, and his book, says Chris, is a fascinating, thoughtful guide to the cutting-edge science that could get us there. Read the review | Order the book
ENDNOTES
Killian Fox has interviewed the war reporter and cartoonist Joe Sacco on the publication of his new book The Once and Future Riot.
Here’s Killian: I’ve been reading Joe Sacco for so long – more than 20 years – that I’d forgotten what a strange proposition he is: a comics writer reporting on the world’s conflict zones who goes deeper than most journalists do – in terms of understanding both the wider social contexts of the stories he’s covering and the individuals caught up in them. The sheer amount of graft this requires, from field work to writing to drawing, is staggering.
When I spoke to Sacco over Zoom last month – he was at his studio at home in Portland, Oregon – I found him every bit as engaging and thoughtful as I’d hoped. In one bit that didn’t make it into the final piece, we discussed the crowd scenes in his brilliant new book on sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh. I don’t think I’ve ever seen drawings of so many people in one book before, I told him. He nodded. “I want the reader to feel the mass, and to also see the individual faces. I've always been a little miffed when cartoonists draw crowds and they’ll draw two or three people and then silhouettes. That doesn’t do it for me: ‘Come on, put your shoulder into it!’” He laughed. “I always drive myself along, you know: I’m a mule, and I’m the mule driver too.”Read the interview | Order the book
Illustration by Charlotte Durance