Live Breaking News & Updates on Sunken Land Begins
Stay updated with breaking news from Sunken land begins. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Subscription Notification We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Please update your billing details here Please update your billing information The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your subscription. Your subscription will end shortly Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your access to the most informative and considered journalism in the UK. ....
Part way through The Silence by Don DeLillo (Picador) I came across a passage that resonated with me more that it perhaps might have done in other circumstances. One of the characters, in one of those archetypal DeLillo conversations that have the dispiriting and disconnecting feel of overlapping monologues, asks: “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?” DeLillo’s novella was written before the pandemic that has had us all spending the year in that casual embrace, but for me it captures perfectly the affect of that year: the sense of isolation, the way that everything is turned so resolutely inwards that any world out there disappears from our ken. And in a year in which our social life has been conducted digitally, our cultural life has been spent not in cinemas and theatres, in concert halls and galleries, but in front of a television screen, then the loss of that digital connection, the blankness of that television screen, is especi ....
Ian Mond Several things kept me sane over the last 12 months. My family, the privilege of having a job while in lockdown, the Backlisted and Coode Street podcasts (particularly Coode Street‘s “10 minutes with” series), and the books I read. Yes, there were times in 2020 where I struggled to read more than a handful of pages, but the novels, novellas, and collections I did complete (47 of which I reviewed for Locus) were some of the best books I’ve read in the last decade. My favourite work of 2020, the book I know I will return to again and again until the pages are dog-eared and the spine has cracked, is Robert Shearman’s three-volume, 1,700-page, magnum opus ....
Jonathan Strahan (by Francesca Myman) I started the year with good intentions. I intended to read every piece of short fiction that I could lay my hands on, every major novel, every exciting debut or anthology or short story collection and more. I would read all the things. This is the story of how I did not read all the things. I did not even read most of the things. Way back in January, everything seemed simple. I hadn’t heard of a growing problem in China; I’d just delivered my Year’s Best SF anthology to the publisher and finished my part in ....
The book that changed my life So many have! I donât think of this in terms of landmark game-changers, but of as a matter of cumulative effect. One very early example would be Kurt Vonnegutâs Mother Night. It was my introduction to the idea that the sort of book I was looking for didnât necessarily have to be labeled as science fiction. Another would be Level 7, by Mordecai Roshwald, which would also have been my first experience of anti-war satire. The book that had the greatest influence on my writing One of them, certainly, though Iâm still not quite sure how, was ....