Daniel Soar

The world you see​ depends on where you start from. Imagine that the centre of the known universe is the Milwaukee-Chicago corridor, on the shores of Lake Michigan, once the heartland and crossroads of American farming and industry: Wisconsin’s vast dairy herds to the west, Flint and Detroit’s clanking automotive plants and steelworks to the east. Railroads radiate from the...

It’s​ a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. All the modernists were fans. Woolf: ‘Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of...

Iwish​ I’d been there. On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden papier-mâché balls on the plinth at its base. When darkness fell, a firecracker went off, and then another, as sparks and smoke issued from the tip, with louder explosions...

It’s​ not always easy to talk, but sometimes you have to try. Picture this: your brother is dying in a hospice, and you’ve come all the way to the city to see him – something you’ve perhaps resisted for a while – and all you want to do is cheer him up, be a little silly and light-hearted. In Lorrie Moore’s new novel, her fourth, Finn is a high-school...

One of​ the things you can pretty much guarantee about fiction is that it will have people in it. After all, there’s got to be someone telling the story: a narrative implies a narrator. But I challenge you to find a story – even the shortest – that doesn’t imply the presence of at least one other character too. Take this sixty-word wonder by Lydia Davis (it’s...