Laurie McRae Andrew

The old, familiar, generalized fondness: George Saunders’s ‘Vigil’ The jury has been out on George Saunders lately. There’s no denying his place on the A-list of American literary fiction, widely lauded and established as a subject of academic study, with an immed…

New post in time for the weekend: on George Saunders's 'Vigil' and the questionable value of empathy in the face of corporate climate denial

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2026/03/13/t...

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…

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...

You're welcome, it was great fun to read and think about!

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…

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...

'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

‘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.

The wrong angle, somehow: Ben Pester’s ‘The Expansion Project’ Tom Crowley – the central character of Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project – is having a bad day at the office. In fact, the badness has already started before he leaves the house, as he despairs at…

New post on Ben Pester's 'The Expansion Project' and the contemporary office novel: lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/t...

'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 ⬇️

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.

Thanks for reading, glad you enjoyed it!

The wrong angle, somehow: Ben Pester’s ‘The Expansion Project’ Tom Crowley – the central character of Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project – is having a bad day at the office. In fact, the badness has already started before he leaves the house, as he despairs at…

New post on Ben Pester's 'The Expansion Project' and the contemporary office novel: lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/t...

Words are your weapons: Natasha Brown, ‘Universality’ How are the relationships between power and discourse formed in contemporary British journalism and (what passes for) public debate? In what ways do class, race and economics interact with conventi…

NEW POST: on Natasha Brown's 'Universality'

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/w...

Words are your weapons: Natasha Brown, ‘Universality’ How are the relationships between power and discourse formed in contemporary British journalism and (what passes for) public debate? In what ways do class, race and economics interact with conventi…

NEW POST: on Natasha Brown's 'Universality'

lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/w...

'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?

'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

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

What had I arrived at?: Holly Pester’s ‘The Lodgers’ It’s not particularly surprising that housing has been a prominent concern in fiction of the last decade or so. On a general level, the experience of domestic precarity, enfolded in a larger discou…

New blog post: on Holly Pester's fantastic novel 'The Lodgers', published by @grantabooks.bsky.social
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/w...

What had I arrived at?: Holly Pester’s ‘The Lodgers’ It’s not particularly surprising that housing has been a prominent concern in fiction of the last decade or so. On a general level, the experience of domestic precarity, enfolded in a larger discou…

New blog post: on Holly Pester's fantastic novel 'The Lodgers', published by @grantabooks.bsky.social
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/w...

Thanks for checking it out!

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.

'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.

Spritfarer and the Labor of Grief - Unwinnable Judith Butler helps us see how Spiritfarer’s gameplay mechanics connect labor with the politics of grief.

"[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:

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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

'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

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

'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.

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

'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.

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

Writing upside down: Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’ G is a painter whose career is revitalised when he starts to paint upside down. G is a sculptor of woven spider-like forms whose first major retrospective is disrupted when a man throws himself to …

NEW POST on Rachel Cusk's 'Parade': a new formal experiment, moving beyond autofiction towards the limits of the novel.
lauriemcraeandrew.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/w...