Adam Thirlwell

In a library​ when I was young I came across a book published by the Hogarth Press. It was so delicate I hardly wanted to touch it. It had a mottled green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of...

Ilove​ Gertrude Stein but I find it very difficult to think about the way I love her, to be precise about what’s so charming and also valuable in her writing, because everywhere you look there is her image and it can monopolise the attention. Not that I don’t love her image too. The problem is in working out what’s important, the image or the work or the way of living...

Mário​ de Andrade said that he wrote the first draft of Macunaíma in six days. It was December 1926 and he was staying at his uncle’s place outside São Paulo, lying in a hammock, smoking cigarettes and listening to the cicadas. The novel tells the story of the Pemon trickster Macunaíma, whom Andrade had read about in Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s five-volume...

In the era​ of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought about, to be argued over and interpreted, in the era when vernaculars became nationalist instruments, and a writer was bound to their first language not just pragmatically but politically. But...

Bruno Schulz​ was born in Drohobych in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1892. Except for small forays to Warsaw and Vienna, he hardly ever left his home town and died there at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi officer. Schulz published just two books of stories in his lifetime: Cinnamon Shops in 1934 and The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1937. They are...