Novelty alone — with writing as with condoms — should not ever be the overriding criterion when making an important selection. Unfortunately, in their introduction to New Writing 13, Toby Litt and Ali Smith make clear that they have only chosen authors practically squeaking with novelty: writers ‘for whom everything they write is a renewal — of language, of place, of the senses and of the contemporary’. As well as being an essentially meaningless piece of lit — or rather Litt — crit, it tells us that, in this book, newness is as much a question of aesthetics as chronology; it may also remind us that an approach that is so right-on is already a real turn-off.

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