Katie Tobin is an arts writer based in London whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times, Frieze, MUBI Notebook, the Times Literary Supplement, and many more. She is completing a PhD at Durham University.
The last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, workhouses for “morally wayward” women, closed in 1996. Since then, the institutions’ many horrors have come to light, but misinformation has also been endemic. A new book provides a granular, factual account.
Transcription, Ben Lerner’s slim but layered new novel, is a penetrating meditation on fraudulence, fatherhood, and the fate of authentic experience in our digital age.