Even before this spring is done with we can say that the genre is unlikely to furnish a richer reading experience than Greenery this year.
Author: richardsmyth
I'm a writer, journalist, editor, cartoonist and general freelance cultural janitor.
Literary Review review: ‘The All True Adventures (and Rare Education) of the Daredevil Daniel Bones’, Owen Booth (4th Estate, 2020)
This is a novel that surprised me first by existing and then by being not only funny – and it is very funny – but also strangely, desperately moving.
Short story: The Berg
First published in Unthology 11 (2019).
TLS essay: Little Parishes Of Sky
A square mile of sky is, of course, what you make of it.
New Statesman essay: Nature Writing’s Fascist Roots
Eco-fascism is a modern-day ideology, fuelled by the internet, but its roots are deep – and often forgotten.
Review: ‘Car Park Life’, Gareth E Rees (Influx, 2019)
‘Car Park Life’ really is a memoir of car park exploration. Rees’s mission, outlined in the shadow of Hastings Morrisons, is to challenge the ‘assumed truth’ that car parks are ‘non-places’.
Review: ‘Nightingales In Berlin – Searching For The Perfect Sound’, David Rothenberg (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
David Rothenberg has carved out a somewhat crooked niche as a celebrated musician-cum-birdsong investigator, and for some time has been … More
Literary Review review: ‘Homing – On Pigeons, Dwellings, And Why We Return’, Jon Day (John Murray, 2019)
A memoir of pigeon-keeping and middle-class life in flux, Jon Day’s ‘Homing’ is a sort of ‘P Is For Pigeon’.
‘An Indifference Of Birds’
The story of human history
—from a bird’s eye view.
Richard Smyth 