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James Ley
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James Ley

James Ley

James Ley was the Inaugural Editor of the Sydney Review of Books from January 2013 to July 2015 and is now its Contributing Editor. He is the author of The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). icon

My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion

By James Ley

Ann Quin is, above all, a self-aware writer, with an ironic understanding of the limits of symbolic expression, who was nevertheless prepared to test those limits.

The Perspective Is the Story

By James Ley

Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.

The Necessity of an Alternative

By James Ley

Margaret Thatcher made her notorious claim that there is “no such thing as society” in an interview with Women’s Own magazine published in ...

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