Anne Carson’s collections of poetry include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her many translations of classical works include An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Antigone and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. Her H of H Playbook, inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, is being made into an opera. She won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Highlights of Colonialism is due in 2027.
Out of the folds of the heavenly things I was dreaming of Tom Stoppard in a car saying do you want to come look at my etchings and I thought here at last is someone who will know how this drear phrase came to refer to close acts of humankind so I said what does that really mean do you think and he said sex and I awoke in tears because I suddenly remembered when my Dad died I had to pawn his...
… until my middle name is excess … P.J. Harvey
IThat should be enough. Start here.
We go to Dave’s cottage. To go is happy.
Big waves on the lake and thunderstorms predicted.
I will sit on the porch and try to think.
Prepare for thinking (in the car as we go)
by reading a book...
1. Albertine, the name, is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy.
2. Albertine’s name occurs 2363 times in Proust’s novel, more than any other character.
3. Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust’s novel.
4. On a good 19 per cent of these pages she is asleep.
5. Albertine is believed by some critics, including...
for Wally and Deborah and Larry and André
Go to the Wally Shawn play, it is hopeless, I mean production impeccable, philosophy hopeless. Yet it gives me hope! Figure this out. Next day listening to Sam Cooke what comes to me in a dawn café is: no need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light. Order a tofu burrito. C. comes in looking lively. He got to the car just as the...
Anne Carson reads her poem, ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’.
In a rare UK performance Canadian poet Anne Carson read from her recent verse novel Red Doc>, a sequel to her 1998 Autobiography of Red.
The pieces in Wrong Norma are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which appears not as a fact or a verdict but as a feeling.
Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet,...
Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three...
Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...
I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.