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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

NEW WRITING on last year's Goldsmiths Prize winner, C. D. Rose's 'We Live Here Now' (@melvillehouse.bsky.social) - via Mark Fisher, the weird and the eerie, the value of artworks, and the rhapsodic flow of global capitalism... lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2026/01/26/b...

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com

Better weird than eerie: C. D. Rose’s ‘We Live Here Now’

There’s an enduring modern attraction to the weird and the eerie. For Mark Fisher, in his book The Weird and the Eerie, the appeal of these two ‘modes’ is connected to ‘a fascination for the outsid…

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

'Ghostland' by Edward Parnell: lively and engaging exploration of how the shadowy, haunted sides of modern British writing and culture are rooted in place and landscape

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

‘Helm’ by Sarah Hall: the UK’s only named wind as a transhistorical thread drawing together fragments from the stone age to the present. Landscape, climate, ecology as enduring structures of human thought and action, from archaic myth to modern science.

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Jason Arthur @jasonarthur.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

'The vital function of @benpester.bsky.social’s weird office fiction is both to make us look askance at the way we organise & value work, & at the same time to prompt us to look for the contours of other possibilities in the strange & alienating spaces of contemporary labour' Enjoyed this ⬇️

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Ben Pester @benpester.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Ah wow - really loved reading this review of The Expansion Project. I know these things are not for the author really but you have to say thanks when someone is writing at this level about your work. Incredible. So grateful.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

'Perspectives' by Laurent Binet: a clever, playful historical thriller mixing art and politics in C16 Florence - complete with an Assassin's Creed reference and a Renaissance bullet-time moment. What's not to like?

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

'Sick Houses' by Leila Taylor: a fascinating exploration of the real and imagined domestic architecture of horror, both serious about the cultural politics of the genre and joyfully enthusiastic about its pleasures

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

I've written about grief and labour in Spiritfarer, via Judith Butler, for this month's issue of @unwinnable.com

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Alyssa Butler @crimsonlea.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

A fantastic piece about the importance of a meaningful death and how labor ties into Spiritfarer's message of grief. I love this game so much, and @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social has articulated one of the biggest reasons why here.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

'I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There' by @roisinlanigan.bsky.social: a bit of millennial gothic, mixing classic haunted house tropes with Gails and Fleabag references. Finely poised between realism and horror, a compelling invocation of the cursedness of the contemporary housing situation.

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Unwinnable @unwinnable.com · 27/03/2025

"[I]n Stella’s work as Spritfarer, labor is reclaimed and redirected toward the ends of care and the creation of grievable life." Feature Excerpt: @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social applies Judith Butler's theories on grief to Spiritfarer:

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Spritfarer and the Labor of Grief - Unwinnable

Judith Butler helps us see how Spiritfarer’s gameplay mechanics connect labor with the politics of grief.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

'The City Changes its Face' by Eimear McBride: revisits the setup of 'The Lesser Bohemians' in a remarkable novel about language and art as the interface between private darkness and shared/public experience, with McBride's sentence-level experiments matched by subtle structural intricacy.

The cover of 'The City Changes Its Face' by Eimear McBride: a cropped photograph showing a young woman lying on a sofa with a lit cigarette in her hand.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Indika is very bizarre and extremely Russian - the theological themes are fine, but its real richness comes from the extraordinary environmental design and a thorough immersion in the absurdist tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov etc.

A man in military uniform is impaled on a spike with blood around his mouth. A subtitle reads 'His Nobleness has decided to listen to "The Visitation" one last time'.

The main character, a nun in a wimple, dwarfed by enormous stacks of paper and looking up at some mechanical rails high in the distance.

The main character, a nun in a wimple, looks at a gigantic fish suspended from the ceiling.

A first-person view of a mirror in which the character's reflection is replaced by the devil.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware: deftly refracts a history of postwar progressive reconstruction, its internal tensions, and its eventual undoing through a singular and well-crafted voice whose (sometimes gleefully) compromised position saves the novel from over-earnest didacticism

The cover of 'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware, showing high-rise blocks of flats and a chain-link fence against a pink background.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

I've written about grief and labour in Spiritfarer, via Judith Butler, for this month's issue of @unwinnable.com

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey: a slim and sparse reflection on the numinous experience of a planetary view, albeit tempered with insistent consciousness of climate breakdown. Attempts the important work of re-enchantment in an age of Starlink and spiralling ecological disaster.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

'Confessions' by Catherine Airey: a big transatlantic multi-generational novel that takes on some hefty themes. The plotting is a bit over-neat, with one coincidence that stretches credulity, but overall it's well structured, precisely written and deftly handled.

The cover of 'Confessions' by Catherine Airey: a photograph of a young woman on a city street holding a small kitten.

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Colson Whitehead @colsonwhitehead.com · 01/03/2025

I knew I shouldn’t have used that @!*$# AI!

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

'Bad Taste' by @nrolah.bsky.social: a trenchant critique of the dominant aesthetics of contemporary everyday life and how they express and reiterate modes of class power. Both sharp and vivid, ranging effortlessly across cultural forms

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

'The Lodgers' by Holly Pester: a very funny, slightly strange, formally interesting take on precarious housing and its distinctive psychological effects. Tinted with sadness, but focused on the necessary cultural work - and literary possibilities - of imagination and empathy

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

For the new year, I've started a new blog for writing on recent fiction (and perhaps other things, eventually) - starting with last year's 'Mother Naked' by @glenjamesbrown.bsky.social lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/m...

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com

Mother Naked by Glen James Brown

Glen James Brown’s second novel takes its cue from a minor fragment of recorded history: an entry in the ledger of the Bursar of Durham Priory that records the lowest-paid entertainer ever employed…

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Capitalism: A Horror Story by @thelitcritguy.bsky.social: a lively and passionate call for a Gothic sensibility as 'romantic anticapitalism' - we need more writing that takes the radical potential in popular culture this seriously

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Glen James Brown @glenjamesbrown.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

This is the most wonderful, considered - and insightful - discussion of my book I've ever read. Thank you @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social I'm humbled and awed.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova: a darkly satirical lens on contemporary Englishness, with a strong dose of body horror. One or two of these didn't do that much for me, but at their best they're brilliantly weird bits of very black satire, well worth checking out.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 21/08/2024

Mary Morrissy, ‘Penelope Unbound’: an excellent novel that reimagines the life of Norah Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife, on the premise that the two split apart after arriving in Trieste in 1904.

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 21/08/2024

Lauren Oyler, 'No Judgement: On Being Critical': not really criticism, or about criticism per se, but explores how acts of interpretation and evaluation are embedded in a larger cultural and media landscape

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 20/08/2024

Sarah Bernstein, 'Study for Obedience': a disarming combination of the specific and the strange, pitting the freight of Jewish history, the networks of international capital, and the gender politics of care against something blurrier...

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Laurie McRae Andrew @lmcraeandrew.bsky.social · 20/08/2024

So 'The Geographies of David Foster Wallace's Novels' is now available to pre-order in paperback from Edinburgh University Press, if anyone thinks they might be interested edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-geo....

edinburghuniversitypress.com

The Geographies of David Foster Wallace's Novels

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