kevin davey
@kvind.bsky.social
author English Imaginaries, Moscow Gold?, Playing Possum, Radio Joan, and most recently TOOTHPULL OF ST DUNSTAN (2025) / works mostly at Eastside People / lives and writes in Whitstable
I don’t carry a torch for Shriver - the darker the place she is condemned to, the better - but her Spectator column does ask some of the right questions. Which are better considered through the exemplary AI-collaborative indie writing practice of Joanna Walsh (e.g Autobiology, Mis-Communication).
TOOTHPULL was longlisted for the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction prize tonight - thanks to everyone who’s encouraged and helped AAAARGH press and myself over the last few years! open.substack.com/pub/therepub...
The Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize 2026 longlist
The wait is over! Till the shortlist wait
open.substack.com
for some reason Alfred Jarry crossed my mind when I saw Morland’s cartoon in today’s Times
a really impressive account of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s development politically and as a poet, the watershed of 1981 and the importance of John la Rose and New Beacon - though it really should have made more of Race Today, Railton Road, CLR James and Darcus Howe… but it’s a keeper of a piece
London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 12mo ago‘He made white British readers recognise Jamaican patois. Most readers need to articulate the poems in order to understand their meaning: glancing at the page isn’t enough.’ Mendez on Linton Kwesi Johnson: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
A seriously impressive review in the LRB which hasn’t sent me to the title, but headfirst back into the 73 hours of David Lynch’s ten movies and three series of Twin Peaks. I know Godard didn’t like him but Godard wasn’t always on point. The soundtracks are almost as good as JLG’s.
My thoughts on the remarkable fiction of Paul Griffiths in the latest issue of Exacting Clam www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-18...
Paul Griffith's let me tell you and let me go on | Exacting Clam
exactingclam.com
No longer Manga and Murakami. Prospect surveys the boom in fiction translated from Japanese. I guess I should take a look at Murata
Many thanks! to Rónán Hession for his appreciation of TOOTHPULL in the Irish Times this weekend
I can’t help but read the latest Maggie Nelson as a flipside to Toothpull, my recent memoir of a troubled dentist. Pathemata, dis-Latined, is a Book of Suffering. Death is in the air. It’s a COVID era narrative. “Pain pretends urgency” she says, “one has to become cold-hearted to its entreaties.”
as i think (in fact hope) you aren’t likely to be readers of the remote right monthly The Critic, here’s a kiss and tell feature you might otherwise miss - an author’s step by step account of the collapse of Unbound
I’m impressed and also disappointed that the centre right/FT appears to understand the contested and intricate links between literary form, imagination and politics better than the left.
Thank-you Will Davies for reviewing Toothpull of St Dunstan - the memoir of a Canterbury dentist tugging and plugging at the gate to the city for 700 years - in today’s Times Literary Supplement.
A 700 year old dentist. This is a fantastic book. Ambitious idea, dazzling at the sentence level, entertaining in-between. If there's a type of novel you love that you think people "don't publish anymore," it's probably this one. For readers of #AlanMoore and #modernism. Let's call it Mooredernism
kevin davey@kvind.bsky.social · last yr.
OutCalvino-ing Calvino in ‘89! This and The Lay of Sir Tristram - and the musicological expertise of Griffiths’ work on the Second Viennese and Darmstadt schools - are the seedbed for the revoiced Ophelias of LET ME TELL YOU and LET ME GO ON, now combined by NYRB. Republish the backlist, someone.
“Literature is becoming culturally marginal”; “the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking”; its “prestige has declined precipitously.” This week’s New Statesman includes a lamentable Jeremiad by James Marriott, name-checking no writers after Trilling and Auden. Though he does have a point.
Philip Hensher self-puffs his forthcoming history of the novel in this week’s Spectator, trashing Eimear McBride as he goes. Not a volume I’ll be pre-ordering.
TOOTHPULL OF ST DUNSTAN - The startling memoir of a dentist who for 700 years pulled teeth in the approach to Canterbury, beside its city gate. Your copy is ready at Aaaargh Press www.aaaarghpress.com/product/toot...
The pre-packaged sale of Unbound cancels the crowdfunder publisher’s many debts, replacing them with damage control pledges that no-one can rely on; tweaks the brand to Boundless; and leaves the trust and respect of users where? (The Times)
Good company for spring, a brace of poets who never met, each war-wise and more (Pushkin Press). “You can paint with whatever you like, with pipes, with stamps, postcards or playing cards..” - “Ride forward humanity. Saddle the wild herd of sounds!”
72 wonderful indie outlets are on the shortlist for this year’s INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOP OF THE YEAR award (but, inexplicably, my favourite - THE BROADWAY BOOKSHOP in Hackney, is absent) secretldn.com/independent-...
These London Literary Spots Have Been Shortlisted For The ‘Independent Bookshop Of The Year’ Award – And One Of Them Has Only Been Open For Eight Months
The finalists for the highly-coveted award have just been revealed, and these independent London bookshops are certainly in our good books.
secretldn.com
FRIENDS IN LOVE AND WAR / L’ELOGE DES MEILLEURS ES ENNEMIE ES at the Ikon in Birmingham is a visual arts reset with Europe. The highlight is undoubtedly Rachel McLean’s video The Lion and the Unicorn (2012), a comic take on our disunited kingdom in the run up to Scotland’s independence referendum.
frontispiece to Elfriede Jelinek THE CHILDREN OF THE DEAD (Yale UP) / can anyone help?
Paris, November 2015 - the horror. A harrowing read. Stade de France, Belle Equipe, Petit Cambodge, Le Carillon, and Bataclan. Nine Islamists, one night, 130 murders. Hundreds maimed. Emmanuel Carrere on the victims, the killers, the responders, the trial. Hard to read, and necessary.
The late Christopher Hill was central to my life and work. I look forward to reviewing this book for @thenation.com: *Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian* by Michael Braddick, to be published by @VersoBks in February 2025.
I recommend Nell Dunn’s LIVING LIKE I DO as the follow-up read to Susanna Crossman’s candid and compelling memoir of childhood in a commune, HOME IS WHERE WE START. In the mid-70s Dunn visited a range of alternative households in which children thrived. I was a teenager in Chapter 9 Ramsgate.
