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“... does in To The Lighthouse, or would it be entirely different? At the end of Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s first film as a director, Caden Cotard seems to die as a theatrical version of himself inside a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan. A voice that reaches him by wire and microphone has for some time been telling him what to ...”

“... don’t behave as if we were. But then sometimes the distinction collapses, or is displaced, as in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion film Anomalisa, based on a play Kaufman wrote in 2005. When Michael Stone, the author of a bestselling book about improving human relations in business, has a psychological ...”

“... sit a little heavily on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, originally a novel by Iain Reid, which Charlie Kaufman has now adapted as a movie (on Netflix). Out of context, I’m Thinking of Ending Things strongly suggests the possibility of suicide. In context too, as it happens. However, in both Reid and Kaufman’s ...”

“... Total Recall), and Pope’s ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’ revisioned by Charlie Kaufman for the cinema, celebrate the humanity of human beings as the accumulation of their experience. In Dick the androids are given a lifetime of false memories to persuade them they are human, while Jim Carrey’s mind in Eternal Sunshine ...”

“... from the current fashion for baroque narratological cleverness in fiction, like the films of Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan, the novels of David Mitchell, the television of Steven Moffat and his teams on Sherlock and Doctor Who. There are differences between cleverness and intellect. McCarthy has many things he’s trying to do in his ...”

“... years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the ...”

“... a mystery to me why White City Blue should have had so many people, from Tony Parsons to Gerald Kaufman via the Whitbread First Novel Award, in raptures. Rumours of a Hurricane, Lott’s second novel, is a more ambitious, more serious work: the anatomy of a marriage, a dissection of the 1980s. The prologue is set in the winter of 1991. We are introduced to ...”

“... beloved older brother, an extended family in a tight-knit German-American neighbourhood, an Uncle Charlie with a thriving bakery where all the kids worked. But the deep unhappiness of her parents’ marriage seems to have dominated. Alma, a starstruck and vivacious woman who dressed as Santa Claus at Christmas, had named her daughter after the silent screen ...”