Sophie Frazer

In David Cohen’s collection of wry and quirky stories, he follows the lives of various men in their rituals of ordinariness – their failures, foibles, and fetishes – with a razor-like eye observing the disenchantments of modernity. The titular story, ‘The Hunter’, opens onto a wasteland of urban gothic, where economic imperatives rub up against the environment. The grubbiness of capital ... (read more)

'Longing,’ thinks Hazel West, the twenty-five-year-old protagonist of Susan Midalia’s first novel, ‘I could begin a story with longing.’ This is a book about various kinds of longing: the desire for intimacy, for human understanding, for self-possession and self-forgetting. Most of all, though, this is a book about language, about linguistic ‘shades of meaning’. Hazel is preoccupied wi ... (read more)