Friday, January 31, 2025

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark review – life, death and a gnarly dildo

Review

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark review – life, death and a gnarly dildo

Raven Row, London
These intense and intimate photographs of 70s and 80s New York – from a lounging William Burroughs to a masturbating dancer – constantly sweep you away

Adrian Searle

Thu 30 Jan 2025 17.49 GMT

Peter Hujar’s Eyes Open in the Dark is filled with intimacies and confrontations, empty lots, New York up close and seen from afar, hidden spaces and days in the country, sex and bodies, life and death. The effects are cumulative, taking us on a journey that is filled with variety, tenderness and vulnerability, surprise and shock.

Niall Williams

The

Books

0f my

life

Niall Williams: ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’

Niall Williams

Friday 31 January 2025

N
This article is more than 5 months old
The Irish author on Enid Blyton at bedtimes, discovering Dickens, and the brilliance of Edna O’Brien

This article is more than 5 monthsThis article is more than 5 months old
The Irish author on Enid Blyton at bedtimes, discovering Dickens, and the brilliance of Edna O’Brien

My earliest reading memory
I am sitting at the kitchen table at home in Dublin. I am home from school. I am in short pants; my legs dangle. The book in front of me is called Step By Step. It has no author. On the amber paper cover, in my mother’s handwriting, is my name. It is my first spelling book. I still have it. It begins with easy ones, No, Go, So, and works through 20 pages to Deck, Dock, Duck. Everything that follows begins here. When you know your spellings, it is a triumphant moment. You have been given a key.

My favourite book growing up
My hunger for books allowed no time for a favourite. I was on to the next one. All of Enid Blyton might be one multi-volumed book in my memory. The Famous Five and The Secret Seven and the Mystery series all passing through my hands in bedtime reading, to be replaced later by westerns, especially those of Louis L’Amour, whose great virtue was the supply would never run out, because he wrote so many.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Mr Mason had us read it aloud in class, each of 30 teenage boys following the sentences with our finger. The world of that novel was more real to me than the one outside. When Pip fell in love with Estella, I did too.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I could say Dickens again here, for it seems to me that I began to write to rediscover the pleasure I had as a reader. But when I was 21, Christine Breen told me to read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and when I emerged from the humid jungle of those pages, head spinning and imagination fevered, I knew that, for better or worse, making fiction was to be my life, and I hoped it would be with her.
The book or author I came back to
Chekhov. When I first read him as a teenager, I thought: “He’s not so great.” At that age I wanted style, brilliance, dazzlement. It took me 40 years to see his people, their profound humanness, and the genius of his story-making.

The book I reread

The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien. I read it first in university when I wanted to know what every famous Irish writer had done. I reread it when I was working on Time of the Child and realised that one of my characters, Ronnie, the doctor’s eldest daughter, who secretly wants to be a writer, was reading it. It is always startling when you find something is so much better than you remembered. I sent my salute to Edna at her extraordinary funeral.

The book I discovered later in life
I could make this plural and say everything by Edith Wharton. But in particular The House of Mirth. It was chosen by the book club that has met at our house for 16 years. During one year we read only “classics”, to see what that amounted to. And there was Edith, waiting.

The book I am currently reading
A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island 1989-2024 by Carlo Gebler, with photographs by David Barker. Drawing on his meticulously kept journals from over 35 years, Carlo gives us one day for each year. In the company of these sharp, affectionate and wise entries you find yourself saying “Yes” often, and “God, I remember that.”

Time of the Child by Niall Williams is published by Bloomsbury.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE

2021
The books of my life / Amanda Gorman / ‘I wanted my words to re-sanctify the steps of the Capitol’Mary Beard / ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’
Stephen King: ‘I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter’
Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’
Curtis Sittenfeld / ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
Elif Shafak / ‘Reading Orlando was like plunging into a cold but beautifully blue sea’
Jason Reynolds / “Reading rap lyrics made me realise that poetry could be for me”
Michael Rosen / ‘My comfort read? Great Expectations’
Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
Alan Garner / ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’
Rose Tremain / ‘My comfort reads are MasterChef cookbooks’
Oliver Jeffers / ‘Catch-22 was the first time I had a physical reaction to a book’
Penelope Lively / ‘Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees’

2022
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Edmund White / ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
David Mitchell / ‘If I need cheering up, Jamie Oliver’s recipes usually help’
Isabel Allende / ‘I have been displaced most of my life’
Barbara Kingsolver / ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’

2023
Richard Ford / ‘I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere’
Bret Easton Ellis: ‘I connected with Quentin Tarantino’
Lauren Groff / ‘Virginia Woolf’s Flush is delightfully bananas’
Natalie Haynes / ‘I couldn’t stop reading Stephen King - even at the top of the Eiffel Tower’
Richard Armitage / ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’

2024
Mieko Kawakami / “Franz Kafka es mi lectura reconfortante”

2025
Niall Williams / ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’
Graham Norton / ‘The Bell Jar changed how I felt about books’

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Marianne Fauthfull was a towering artist

Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as

Alexis Petridis

30 January 2025

It is difficult to think of a moment in pop history less receptive to a 1960s icon relaunching their career than in 1979. At that point, British rock and pop resolutely inhabited a world shaped by punk: it was the year of 2-Tone and Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, of Ian Dury at No 1 and Blondie releasing the bestselling album of the year. And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” as the Clash had sung.