Leo Robson

Ralph Ellison​ described Invisible Man as an account of his narrator’s movement from ‘purpose to passion to perception’, terms borrowed from the critic Kenneth Burke. By the time Ellison began writing the book, in the summer of 1945, he believed that anyone could gain a clearer mind, but only through an encounter with failure or anguish. According to the Greek proverb...

Nicola Barker’s​ latest novel, TonyInterruptor, is a reaction to, and reflection on, a moment of creative crisis. While writing H(A)PPY (2017), Barker has said, she stopped sleeping for nine or ten months. On completing the book she was convinced that her relationship with the novel form was over: ‘I felt everything falling away around me, the entire construct of my life, my...

During​ a four or five-year period at the turn of the millennium, I went to the cinema around six hundred times – or, I should say, I saw around six hundred films at the cinema, since many of the visits were for double, triple and occasionally quadruple bills. I wasn’t a film critic or festival programmer or even an aspiring director. I was just an adolescent schoolboy and, in...

There’s​ a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an organism able to survive both on land and in water, and that it comes from the Greek for ‘double life’. Though you would be hard-pressed to draw a clean analogy, Murray surely qualifies as an...

The title​ of Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel suggests a conflict of priorities: an impulse to totalise and a fondness for variety, a love of clarity paired with a penchant for clutter. The aspiring saga builder pauses, mid-set piece, to insist he’s actually a spry postmodernist. Only one of these authorial personae was evident in Hemon’s early work. Born in Sarajevo to a...