Eimear mcbride biography of abraham lincoln
•
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Young Vic
You bet. Firstly, it’s a book that was written as a stream of consciousness so it really does demand to be heard as well as read. In the original, a young woman communicates in a spillage of fragmented sentences, half-completed thoughts and bits of conversations and dialogue. It’s fast; it’s raw; it’s compelling in its pain and anguish. Definitely not a quiet read. Here Ryan and Duffin do the story justice by seamlessly turning a piece of literature into a performance event.
This is a stunning performance of a stunning play
But be braced for the bleak. The nameless girl lives with her brother, who suffers from cancer of the brain, and their mother, a rather tyrannical and unsympathetic woman whose husband has left her. An atmosphere of religious bigotry and
•
How reading has changed in the 2010s
Features correspondent
From ‘difficult’ works to Instapoetry, Erica Wagner picks the most important book trends of the past decade.
For a while we were told that books were going to be a thing of the past. A new century had dawned, our lives were being digitised and surely there was no longer any reason to lug the pressed pulp of dead trees around. And yet, over the past decade, it seems clear that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated. As we move into the 2020s there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the resurgence of the book – while also acknowledging that other avenues for storytelling are opening not only in the marketplace but in readers’ minds. The fact that we spend more and more time online may mean that we are increasingly distracted from reading… but it can also mean that readers have more avenues to find the stories they want and need.
Do judge a book by its cove
•
From Virginia to Tennessee, from east to west and from north to south, war was raging. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln had said – and the biblical prediction had been proved right. From 1861 to 1865 the United States were the divided states, riven bygd a war whose horror has not faded. But in February 1862 death came to Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s door when their 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhoid fever. The couple were no stranger to grief; their son Edward had died at the age of three in 1850, not long before Willie was born. But Willie was the Lincolns’ blue-eyed boy, their älskling. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who was Mary’s seamstress and friend, left an konto of the president’s grief. “I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder,” she wrote. “His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. inom did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.”
Keckley’s wo