Let's Kill the Teacher by Dent, Alan 2024 NEUF

In its readiness to listen in on the speech of a wide variety of ordinary, working people, and to give us insights into the texture of their daily lives, Dents writing is not merely unfashionable, it is like very little that is currently being written (or anyway published.) It does however remind me of that fine, scandalously neglected American writer, Nelson Algren. Like Algren, Dents socialism, while never reductive, is integral to his vision of what life is and what it could be. And like Algren, he makes satisfying stories out of what happens to happen to the kind of people whose existence, when its noticed at all, is for the most part caricatured or sentimentalized. In other words, Dent testifies to the value of Camuss claim that art is nobodys enemy, because it opens the prisons and gives voice to the sorrows and joys of all.John Lucas

Alan Dent is a poet, critic, novelist, translator and editor. He has published five collections of poetry and translated the same number from French. His comic picaresque A Small Taste of Freedom appeared in 2019. A new story collection, Palestinian Tales, is due in 2021. This is volume eight of his eight-volume roman fleuve The Craxton-Langs.