We meet Kneecap backstage at Kingston’s Circuit ahead of an intimate album launch show on St George’s Day (no reader, they do not celebrate). It’s been about a year and half since we last spoke. “A pretty uneventful few months I must say,” jokes Mo Chara, given the lifetime of headlines and controversy the Belfast rap…
Happy Friday, readers! Here at Lit Hub, we’re still catching joy where we can nab it. With apologies for a weekend off here and there, we’re back to report on the sweet things that are making us smile. Calvin Kasulke is taking heart in the long haul. “As a consistent but not at all competitive…
This weekend, the Park Avenue Armory plays host to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair—i.e., Mecca, for a certain type of bibliophile. At the press preview, I’m conspicuously underdressed, having (lazily) assumed bowties and sweater-vests would rule the day in this crowd. Instead, it’s a sea of chic blue suits. Multiple dealers arrive in sequined floor-length…
On a perfect spring day in Paris, the deer is first visible in the distance, poised between an avenue of just-budding plane trees in the 7th arrondissement. Its head is raised, its body poised. Seen there among the trees, it really could be a wild animal. In reality, it is a concrete deer, and not…
For years, Live Nation’s executives told anyone who would listen that they weren’t a monopoly, just a very large, very successful company with a lot of satisfied customers. On April 15, a federal jury in Manhattan saw through it. After six weeks of trial and four days of deliberation, the jurors found Live Nation and…
Yes, there will be the more predictable elements: a full-scale model of the Oval Office, videos of election nights and mannequins wearing the first lady’s dresses. But the Obama Presidential Center, which officially opens on the South Side of Chicago in June, will also have a feature rarely — if ever — prominent in past…
This is the kind of book you pitch by analogy: JG Ballard meets Gabrielle Zevin; Isaac Asimov meets Stephen Chbosky; Ready Player One meets Love, Simon (replete with ferris wheel). I’ve been describing it to friends as a YA Kazuo Ishiguro set adrift in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. It turns out I have two kinds of…
In Euronews Culture’s review of the film Kneecap, the award-winning biopic about the rise to fame of the Belfast rap trio, we called the comedy “fun, raucous and heartfelt”. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT The same could be said about their new album, ‘Fenian’ – but we’d add ‘scathing’, ‘layered’, and ‘very foul-mouthed’. Indeed, if Martin Scorsese’s The…
Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra (Faber, £14.99)Given the relish with which Nagra pushes and pulls at English, it’s worth noting that Yiewsley is a real west London suburb. This location allows him to continue his career-long exploration of childhood working-class Sikh experience and, through it, wider questions of identity. But as Nagra turns 60, location is…
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET TODAY: In 1919, the May Day Riots take place in Cleveland, Ohio. They will become the subject of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “May Day,” first published in The Smart Set in 1920. Is satire really dead? According to Erin Van Der Meer, we’re the ones who just aren’t…
