#nell dunn

[theconformistreader]

My collection of “kitchen sink” novels.

[kammartinez]

Up the Junction: A Place, A Fiction, A Film, A Condition - JSTOR Daily

In addition to a New Wave hit, Nell Dunn's 1963 book about young women in a poor London neighborhood inspired a Ken Loach adaption that help

[kamreadsandrecs]

Up the Junction: A Place, A Fiction, A Film, A Condition - JSTOR Daily

In addition to a New Wave hit, Nell Dunn's 1963 book about young women in a poor London neighborhood inspired a Ken Loach adaption that help

[books0977]

Up the Junction. Nell Dunn. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963. Illustrations by Susan Benson. First edition. Original dust jacket.

Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry.

[sad-friend-you-cannot-change]

I would be in a cell all my life

Up to that minute I had always thought that another person, mainly a man, would help me, in my needs. I always dreaded prison, or a hospital bed or a nun's cell or the places in the world where I would be alone with my own needs without the crutches of other people. And at that point, when I knew I loved this person who couldn't, for one reason or another, receive the love I had to give him, I decided or concluded that I was in a cell and would be in a cell all my life and that everyone is in a cell consumed with need, or longing, or pain of one thing or another, and that the odd time they can come together is really very rare and can't be sustained throughout a marriage - certainly it can't - at all, and then thinking of this cell I thought friendship, laughter, the sun, the sky, these are the things that matter.

- from Edna O’Brien’s interview in Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women

[putawaytheglobe]

Read in January 2019

It’s been a hard month. But reading Sara Ahmed helped.

[kammartinez]

‘Witty, anarchic and sexually frank’: Ali Smith on Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women

Sex, money, freedom, class ... Dunn’s 1960s interviews with Edna O’Brien, Pauline Boty, Ann Quin and others are a revelation today

[aranazo]

Up The Junction by Nell Dunn.