Creative Digest #14: Spring Reading
The latest edition of our departmental Substack
Welcome to the fourteenth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
Upcoming events:
Wednesday 23 April, 5.00pm: Postgraduate online taster session — This taster seminar looks at the American writer Maggie Nelson’s phenomenally successful, genre-defying memoir The Argonauts. Register for your free place here
God be with you, seeker
by Joe Thomas
I’m on a pretty good reading run at the moment and it always feels fortunate when it happens and then sort of inevitable when I reflect on the titles I’ve picked. First, two books that were published recently but that I actually read around Christmas, both by established novelists who I think should be better known. In fact, these two writers might be my favourite contemporary male-identifying novelists writing ‘literary fiction’ in English. David Szalay’s Flesh is a spare and unsettling – both in terms of theme, sentence by sentence approach and structural execution – depiction of an itinerant and provocative life. Ben Markovits’ The Rest of our Lives is a sort of inversion of the classic American road trip in which a middle-aged man makes sense of his life (or tries to, at least) in prose written with such beautiful clarity and poignancy it can feel unbearable.
We were very lucky to have two brilliant novelists visit our Working as a Writer module in recent weeks and I read their latest books in preparation. Eliza Clark’s She’s Always Hungry is a ‘Greatest Hits’ (her words) ‘Vol. 1’ (mine) short story collection that covers a number of different genres, styles, and approaches but is always insightful and fascinating and very, very funny indeed. Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel Saraswati has been picked by the Observer as one of the debuts of 2025 and is a polyphonic novel about the political and social consequences of the rediscovery of a sacred river and the impact on the lives of the seven protagonist-narrators. Gurnaik also reminded me of the key short story writing advice he once gave our undergraduates and which I referenced in a post a year or so ago: disrupt the status quo. Indeed.
I read two, slim, brilliant European novels in quick succession. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden has had a good deal of (deserved, in my opinion) prize-recognition (Booker, Women’s Prize). I found it an immersive and subtle novel and both the prose style and the darker themes reminded me of Tessa Hadley’s work (which is a big compliment as I love all Tessa’s books; I really enjoyed her novella, The Party, in fact, which I read a few months ago). Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof is an extraordinary novel, the first part of a proposed seven book series connected to and around the 1990 Scandinavian Star tragedy. For the most part it’s an unconventional and electric love/hate story, and like John Self describes in his Guardian review: ‘Will we see Maggie or Kurt again [in the next volume]? Will it all connect in the end? It’s intriguing, it’s maddening, it’s exciting. I’m in.’
Finally, I think Miranda July’s All Fours might be the funniest book I’ve ever read, or at least laughed out loud at most. It’s so funny that when I was reading Ben Markovits’ recent piece about the new midlife crisis novel and he quotes All Fours, I had to sit down and recover I was laughing so much, not as the quote out of context is especially funny, but because I remembered it in context and this was enough to provoke a sort of Proustian moment of associated hysteria. Let’s end with it: ‘Maybe midlife crises [muses July’s narrator] were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.’
Relatable reading
By Jessica Andrews
Some books I have enjoyed recently are:
Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin
An intense, shapeshifting stream-of-consciousness novel which conveys a young woman’s consciousness and bodily experience in multi-layered prose. When Lispector was editing the novel, she said to a friend, ‘When I reread what I’ve written, I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit’ – relatable!
Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof translated from Danish by Caroline Waight
An account of the 1990 Scandinavian Star ferry disaster, told through the lives of a couple who are adjacent to the story, rather than directly involved in it. This is an interesting way of addressing historical events slantways, just out of shot, interrogating the effects on the lives of characters who are secondary to the action.
Good Girl by Aria Aber
Aria Aber's debut seethes and shimmers, following her protagonist, Nila, from party to club to dawn in Berlin. It explores what it means to be young amidst the dark history which lingers in the concrete, amid the racism, geopolitics and patriarchal culture which lead Nila to hide her Afghan heritage. She is caught between cultures, attempting to distance herself from her family through the early 2000s Berlin party scene. This novel interrogates the necessity of facing hard truths in order to own yourself, before you are swallowed by the limits the world places on you.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride
This novel re-introduces Ely and Stephen, characters from McBride’s earlier work, The Lesser Bohemians. Her manipulation of voice is particularly impressive; Ely reads as an older character than in the first novel; more cohesive, yet neurotic and spiralling in the wake of a new event in her life. McBride’s evocation of domesticity is tender and sad, demonstrating the ways in which domestic spaces can hold both intimacy and distance.
It Lasts Forever and Then Its Over by Anne De Marcken
A meditation on grief which interrogates what we mean by the phrase ‘undead’. De Marcken layers dreamlike symbols and metaphors to craft a moving exploration of the interior landscape of loss. Surreal, poetic and beautiful; I’ve never read a book like this.
Spring Poems
By Rebecca Tamás
Poetry is for all seasons, but there is no time of year that poets love more than spring – that moment of intense transition and change, life and death mixing in with each other, and the world shifting beneath our feet. So, to celebrate April’s moment of flux, here are (some) of my most beloved spring poems. They all explore the season’s potential in very different ways, showing us the infinite creative potential of spring. Perhaps they might inspire some germination and growth in your own writing ….
The Enkindled Spring - D.H Lawrence
‘I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth …’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44578/the-enkindled-spring
Home Thoughts from Abroad - Robert Browning
‘Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
…
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43758/home-thoughts-from-abroad
Sonnet - Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
‘So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53784/sonnet-56d233695cc6f
Spring - Elfriede Jelineck, trans Michael Hoffman
‘april breath
of boyish red
the tongue crushes
strawberry dreams’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49891/spring-56d22c73a7306
Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang - Li Bai
‘From whose home secretly flies the sound of a jade flute?
It's lost amid the spring wind which fills Luoyang city.’
http://www.chinese-poems.com/lb12.html
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Psycho, Bent and other novels.
Department news:
The French translation of Joe Thomas’s novel Playboy is published on 4 April as Brazilian Playboy, and the German translation of White Riot on 16 April.
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