Tale

‘In the dark times / Will there also be singing?” muses Brecht in the Svendborg Poems. “Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” The impulse for lamentation in a crisis is instinctive and, perhaps, socially useful. But how we voice a response to catastrophe can be contentious, not least with the recent Covid pandemic. And while it may be too early to judge the overall effect of the crisis on the written word, we seem to have come out of it with more of a feeling of discord than harmony, and a sense that…

Tomas Franzese / Riot Forge Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story is a new game about getting out of your comfort zone and connecting with others. In many ways, that’s also the story of Riot Forge. The publishing label pushed its corporate parent Riot Games out of its AAA design instincts to expand the world of Runterra. There’s only so much narrative you can weave into something like League of Legends, and all of Riot Forge’s games offered unique perspectives that enriched this world. I found fulfillment in that…

Sumptuous, sensual and impossibly handsome, at first glance French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s lavish foodie romance The Taste of Things looks like just another decorous prestige period drama. But in its elegantly restrained way, Tran’s film, which is set almost entirely in the kitchen, grounds and dining room of the country chateau of famed gourmet Dodin (Benoît Magimel) in 1880s France, is every bit as radical and risk-taking as some of the showier, quirkier awards contenders this year (it was France’s…

Nigeria’s literary canon in English is a rich and ever-evolving archive, ranging from Chinua Achebe’s cornerstone Things Fall Apart to Buchi Emecheta’s moving lamentations on immigrant life in 1960s London; from Ben Okri’s dreamscapes to the colourful comedy of Lola Shoneyin’s 2010 novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. This treasure trove is often a point of departure for the nation’s younger writers, with intertextual hat tipping – covert or otherwise – widespread. In the opening of Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings,…

Arkadii Nepytaliuk grew up in a small village in Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region under the control of the Soviet Union. “As a child, I did not know about the existence of LGBT people at all. I learned about them in Kyiv when I was studying … and they scared me a lot. I was scared to imagine that a guy could fall in love with another guy.”Nepytaliuk, now 56, is a film director whose latest film Lessons of Tolerance hopes to challenge Ukrainian people to rethink how they treat others in society. Inspired by Igor Bilyts’ 2017…

“Guess who’s back on the news, it’s your favourite Republican hoods,” spits Móglaí Bap on Kneecap’s 2019 track, Get Your Brits Out – a roiling, riotous tune, rapped in both English and Irish, in which the trio imagine a drug-fuelled night out with DUP politicians.“Favourite Republican hoods” is a cheeky yet apt descriptor for how the provocative, satirical Irish-language rap group have been received this year. Kneecap became the surprise stars of Sundance film festival, where their biopic – a semi-fictional origin story…

Here’s yet another low-budget, straight-to-streaming British second world war flick: just as much of a men-on-a-mission throwback as last month’s War Blade, but a few notches more competent thanks to a more compact setup, occasional bursts of galvanic film-making from director Bill Thomas, and a grimier tone that is more Dirty Dozen than Saving Private Ryan.It’s backs-to-the-wall time; Sergeant Mason (James Oliver Wheatley) and his not-especially-crack commando squad bungle a raid on a Nazi convoy and find themselves…

At one point in Fiona Williams’s accomplished debut novel, an elderly lady tells 10-year-old Max Hembry that the broken bricks employed to build his family’s cottage were also used as ballast at sea, “to weigh down them clipper ships sent to collect sugar from the Caribbean … yes, where your nana and grandad came from”. The symbolism could not be more explicit: that which appears damaged can, from a different perspective, offer stability.The House of Broken Bricks follows the Hembry family through a calendar year during…

Why do smart women expect their lovers to leave their wives, despite overwhelming evidence that the contrary is more likely? Australian critic Madeleine Gray is the latest writer to explore this question, in an acutely witty debut that charts, in painful detail, the inexorable arc of an affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss.The story is not original. That’s the point. Other recent novels examining similar relationship dynamics include Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Imogen Crimp’s…

Jonathan Ogilvie is the New Zealand film-maker who made the gangster drama The Tender Hook (2008) and also Lone Wolf (2021), a postmodern spin on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Now he hits a lighter, gentler and much more personal note in this coming-of-age comedy, which opens the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) – a nostalgiafest romance from the 70s post-punk era about a kid in New Zealand mooching around in his uncool school uniform, hanging out in the local record shop (which still has its prog-era name of…