Books on the menu

Bitesize essays and short stories are just made for reading one hour at a time. Laura Potter of The Book Club

Review podcast (thebookclubreview. co.uk) suggests some collections to whet your appetite

Funny Weather: Art in an

Emergency by Olivia Laing (Picador) ‘What use is art?’ That’s the question Laing circles around in this thoughtprovoking, sometimes revelatory, collection of essays.

Dancers on the Shore by

William Melvin Kelley (Riverrun) No one writes like Kelley, yet few remembered his name until The New

Yorker hailed him as ‘the lost giant of American literature’ in 2018. First published in 1964, this collection of stories reads as if written in dialogue and is especially relevant in light of Black Lives Matter. Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

Written during lockdown, these essays offer Smith’s very particular brand of insight into our troubled times. A delight.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (Serpent’s Tail) A memoir that reads like fiction, constructed as a kaleidoscope of fragments that sketch Machado’s relationship with a woman who both loved and abused her.

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko, translated by Polly Barton (Tilted Axis Press) Japanese ghost stories retold with a feminist spin. That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written edited by David Miller (Head of Zeus) Work your way through those writers that you’ve always meant to read but have never got around to, from Chekhov to Flaubert, Muriel Spark to Alice Munro.