Welcome to Growth Month here at the Ark Review. Taking inspiration from the theme devised by our friends at the KBH Læser festival, we have decided to devote some of the articles/reviews/musings this month to the festival’s theme of growth (Vækst). As KBH Læser state in their description of the theme, it is hard these… Keep Reading
A list of books that have been hidden in my shelf and now demand my attention. Despite having moved countless times and between countless countries for the past several years, I have always manage to lug around a quite sizeable collection of books. I can’t help myself. Living in the Bloomsbury district of London (don’t… Keep Reading
The prose of the poets is what permits those who fail to read poems to nevertheless hear a poet’s voice. This one certainty arrives in the midst of many possibilities: it can be a sacrifice, a paradox and a stratagem. Above all, however, it can be a delight. The prose of the poets can be… Keep Reading
A few months ago, I became incredibly drunk while catching up with a friend of mine, the writer of strange and sadly funny stories of social commentary, Luke Hilton, when I hit upon a way to articulate something that had been playing on my mind for a while. Of course owing to the effects alcohol… Keep Reading
The main library of the University of Birmingham is a place where you can still get lost among the shelves of books. You can take a silent walk among them and hear nothing but this slight, distinct buzz of halogen lamps. Lamps that produce only a dim light if you pull a string attached. Or… Keep Reading
The impossibility of politics and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Macon Holt Whatever happens today with the U.S. there will be something disappointing about it. Unless you naively think, as Slavoj Žižek does, that a rupture of neoliberal capitalism’s support system, in the U.S.A’s political establishment, with a Trump victory, outweighs the possibility of a… Keep Reading
I want to share my first time with you. A wooden bench in St. James Park, London. June 14th 2013. A sunny day, ducks in the pond and that sweet smell of summer, and then ahh. Pure pleasure. Because this happened: Let me repeat that for you: You came to me this morning And you handled… Keep Reading
Like Virginia Woolf’s needed excuse ‘for walking half across London between tea and dinner,’ I want an excuse to roam Nørrebro, the part of Copenhagen I feel I know the best, this fine Wednesday forenoon. But I lack a purpose. That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the… Keep Reading
A speculation on the future of cultural production in the post-Brexit age. The Great British Brexit Novel is a phrase that is likely to adorn the blurbs of numerous books published in the decade to begin five years hence. Many will be written by figures of the UK literary establishment—the beginning of Martin Amis’ late-late… Keep Reading