Books

Review: Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt

Tanja Arnheim and Jerome Aimler are Millennials in a long-distance relationship. Tanja is a Berlin-based novelist and Jerome a Frankfurt-based web designer. They text regularly and occasionally visit one...

Writers on Writing: Reflections on the 2025 Oxford Literary Festival

The Oxford Literary Festival is one of those events I hear about every year,...

Joanna Miller’s ‘The Eights’: Unapologetically, indulgently Oxford

Do not worry: despite the title, this is not a rowing novel. Instead, the...

A Trinity trail of Oxford’s best reads and retreats

Trinity Term has come upon us faster than the lovely magnolia has blossomed, which...

Friday Favourite: The Waves

The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a book that I unapologetically love. As an English student with a long reading list, I don’t tend...

Oxford love can hurt like this

Okay, I thought, when I found myself two weeks into lockdown: NOW is the time to finally read that copy of Brideshead Revisited I...

Love, sex and psychedelics in 70s San Francisco

Pride. Sex. Psychedelics. The words spring to mind quickly when thinking of San Francisco in the seventies. Between the tail end of an active...

Friday Favourite: Jane Eyre

In Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, the protagonist spends her teenage years at Lowood School – an institution with a cast of cruel...

Bringing together Oxford’s zines

In light of the current coronavirus situation, we at Cherwell are interested in bringing together student zines to publicise Oxford's writing community. Many students in...

Friday Favourite: The Things They Carried

In the perverse manner of a bored and immature conscript in peacetime, I spent my weekends off in 2015 and 2016 consuming as much...

Review: La Peste

‘Nous sommes en guerre’, Macron said in his address to the French nation on 16th March. At the time, my mother and I thought...

Friday Favourite: War and Peace

In this Coronavirus season, existing dystopian novels have suddenly become “prophetic”. The world may be grinding to a standstill, but Generation COVID can’t while...

Comfort Reading in the Time of Covid-19

David Nicholls  If rom-coms are the most comforting type of movie, then David Nicholls writes the most comforting type of novel. He is best known...

‘and all manner of things shall be well’

Jack Glynne-Jones explores how T.S. Eliot provides solace in periods of stress

Review: Diary of a Murderer and Other Stories by Kim Young-Ha

‘It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?’ A serial killer suffering from Alzheimer’s attempts to protect his daughter...

Review: Conversations with Friends

At one point in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, the protagonist, Frances, tells her best friend and former girlfriend, Bobbi: ‘If I could talk like you...

David Copperfield: strikingly modern?

We often speak of a ‘writer for our times’, the ‘voice of a generation’ – there is this need to define our age, to...

Review: That Reminds Me (2019)

Fragmentary, authentic and poetic – Derek Owusu’s latest publication, That Reminds Me, succeeds in its painfully honest exploration of a young Ghanaian boy’s journey into adulthood.  When...

Eco-Fiction

Last November, Waterstones named Greta Thunberg as their ‘author of the year’. Her collection of speeches, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, certainly...

The Modern Memoir

“I can’t believe that we’re on the fifth instalment of my autobiography. As usual with me, the three years since my last book, You Only...

Literary Blackface

When the largest book retailer in the United States, Barnes & Noble, launched their so-called Diverse Editions initiative in honour of Black History Month,...

Review: Caging Skies and Jojo Rabbit

When depicting the world and ideology of Nazi-Germany, the theme of childhood or the child-like figure is quite a well-used one. Key examples include...

Queer Theory

As we go into LGBT+ History Month, many figures throughout history - modern or not - are looked upon and celebrated, and rightly so....

Queer Victoriana: Sex in the City

In 1881, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was published privately in 250 copies. It purports to be the memoirs of Jack Saul, a...