Benjamin Markovits

Before Mark Costello became a writer he was a federal prosecutor. His first book, Bag Men (1997), was set in 1960s Boston. A priest is murdered on the runway at Logan. A new ultra-pure drug is killing the hippies in Cambridge; another one is sending them mad. The hero, just finished at Boston College Law School, explains to his wife why he wants to be a DA: they ‘help people...

Rosehips or Hagebutten As I grew up calling themHaggard buttons they sound like Though in fact appear brighter Altogether more cherubic Tough in the cheek like a forced smile Hanging on till it cracks The colour of tomato and mascarpone

Flourished thornily beside the bicycle path Running along the carefully displaced One on top of the other slightly Wonky seaside rocks interspersed By sand...

Alice McDermott writes about Irish-American blue-collar neighbourhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, and summer getaways on Long Island. Someone in her novels always has a cottage there, acquired by a stroke of good fortune and maintained in spite of the surrounding gentrification. She writes about the generation before hers: the policemen, mailmen, shoe salesmen and streetcar conductors still...

In Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold, a young woman is hospitalised by the combined forces of an unhappy love affair, an artist’s photograph of her, and her translation of an early 20th-century German novella – this is plausible enough, to Hustvedt’s credit. Her plots depend on the occult power of art and the frailty of our ordinary healthy relation to the...

Milan Kundera’s novels are built around ideas – predicaments, particular emotions, even gestures – like cities around metro stops. His characters live as close to them as possible, meet others of a like mind or misery, then depart for the next stop and the next conception. His new novel, Ignorance, isn’t about ignorance in the ordinary sense, but about the predicaments...