Day of All Saints: An Interview with Patricia Grace King

Day of All Saints, a new novella by Durham-based author, Patricia Grace King, immerses readers within the experience of Guatemalan refugees and the challenges of integration in modern America. Yasmine Shamma interviewed Patricia ahead of her book launch in Empty Shop HQ on 1st December.  I was immediately entranced by your treatment of Martín, an...

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Young Poets and Performance: An Interview with the Organisers of Knee Deep

For young poets based in the North East, the Knee Deep workshop held as part of Durham Book Festival will offer an opportunity to develop poetry for performance rather than for the printed page. READ caught up with the two organisers, Jasmine Simms and Tess Denman-Cleaver, to find out why performing poetry can bring a fresh impetus...

What Brief Interviews with Hideous Men can tell us about rape culture

A serial womaniser. A commitment-phobic boyfriend. A wife beater. David Foster Wallace's 1999 book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men presents a provocative view of male misogyny and its effects on women. In this brief interview with READ, which expands upon his recent Postgraduate English article, Matthew Alexander suggests that Wallace's work is an important text for our times, especially...

How E.M. Forster and Igor Stravinsky Thought About the “Primitive”

In the early twentieth century the concept of “primitive” cultures carried both negative, racist connotations, and also positive ideas about people uncorrupted by the modern world. Victoria Addis, whose article on this topic appears in the new issue of Postgraduate English, introduces us to two modernists – E.M. Forster and Igor Stravinsky – who drew on...

Troublesome Children in Fin-de-Siècle Literature

How are children represented in Victorian literature? How can contemporary psychology help to understand the role of the child in literature? In light of her recently published article on Rudyard Kipling's Kim, READ interviewed Roisín McCloskey on the role of the child in fin-de-siècle literature. Roisín explores the different ways in which these charismatic children reflect issues such as class,...