BOOK OF THE WEEK
One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson
“I am an evangelist for the power of stories,” Jeanette Winterson wrote on her Substack earlier this year. “Story-power works on us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and eventually, physically, in that we are able to make changes in our material world.” From Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit onwards, the transformative power of narrative has been a theme in Winterson’s work: in this unusual hybrid work of memoir, essay and fiction, she uses a reading of One Thousand and One Nights – the Middle Eastern folk tales first translated into English in the 18th century – as a counterpoint to sketches from her own childhood. The title comes from seeing Aladdin reading in a pantomime, an experience that “sparked an affinity with the power of stories to transport (in her case, out of Accrington) and their effects to multiply”, as our reviewer Alex Clark writes. An energetic, thought-provoking and at times poignant book by an always-original mind. Read the review | Buy the book
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Nonfiction
Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift by Stephanie Burt
Should Taylor Swift be taught as literature? Undoubtedly, says Stephanie Burt, who in 2024 launched a course on Swift at Harvard university titled Taylor Swift and Her World: “We will move through Swift's own catalogue, including hits, deep cuts, outtakes, re-recordings, considering songwriting as its own art, distinct from poems recited or silently read… We will look at her precursors, from Dolly Parton to the border ballads… And we will read… novels, memoirs and poems by (among others) Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson, Tracey Thorn, and William Wordsworth.” But is Swift really a genius? That’s the wrong question, says Kitty Empire in her forthcoming review: Taylor’s Version is a necessary corrective to the dead hand of the “rockist recidivists” and “high-culture fossils”. Buy the book
Fiction
Service by John Tottenham
Sean is a middle-aged, misanthropic bookseller in Los Angeles – the kind of person who calculates how much time he spends on card transactions – “nine full workdays a year spent processing and handling these items of mercantile filth” – and is infuriated by customers who gush “That would be amazing” when offered a bag. He provides a delicious skewering of literary pretensions in the hugely enjoyable Service. Read the review | Buy the book
Chris Power’s paperback choice
On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell
Who would have thought being stuck in the same 24-hour loop, Groundhog Day-style, would have so much dramatic potential? But if you haven’t yet read the first two volumes in Danish writer Solvej Balle’s time-warping science-fiction heptalogy, published earlier this year, you have a thrilling journey ahead, says Chris Power in this Sunday’s paperback review. Buy the book
ENDNOTES
TS Eliot’s 20th-century nightmares: on The Hollow Men
Jude Rogers has written a fascinating essay about Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men, written 100 years ago this month. Here’s Jude on how it came about:
“An Eliot nerd since I was a maudlin 16-year-old, after my tertiary college English teacher showed me the first page of The Waste Land, I've long loved the haunted, gothic reverberations of his poetry (the anti-semitism and misogyny I could do without). Noticing ’hollow men’ popping up this year in Anya Taylor-Joy drama The Gorge, I disappeared into a wormhole of bangs and whimpers, trying to find out why this poem’s lines have been quoted so much, pulling my Eliot letter anthologies from my bookshelves, having a brilliant email correspondence with the generous Clare Reihill from the Eliot estate, and even digging up mediocre 1934 romantic movies online to watch on my lunch break (waiting an hour to hear the lines with which this piece starts – but it was worth it).” Read the piece
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Portrait of Jeanette Winterson courtesy of David Levenson/Getty Images