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“... Haruki Murakami’s translator, Philip Gabriel, describes him as a ‘one-man revolution in Japanese fictional style’. His early novels and short stories of the 1980s – playful, wry, experimental, saturated in references to Western culture – made him the spiritual cheerleader of a new generation of writers ...”

“... is at work. Alfred Birnbaum uses lots of slang and a more hardboiled tone; Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel use strongly American English; Gabriel and Rubin favour flatness and don’t worry much about freshness of diction. All the same, Murakami does a serviceable impression of Raymond Carver, one of the many ...”

“... Talking to Jay McInerney in 1992, the year South of the Border, West of the Sun was published in Japanese, Haruki Murakami said that he wasn’t so much an international writer, as a non-national writer: ‘You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too “Japanese” ...”

“... and comic nightmare more reminiscent of Lem’s Futurological Congress than of anything in Philip K. Dick, the father and son actually change places (it might have been called ‘The Switchover’), the former becoming a teenager while the latter assumes the advanced age of the father (38), the whole being projected onto an analogous ...”

“... poems along, and my father brought his translations, mostly from the Catalan, of poets such as Gabriel Ferrater. When, late in life, my father completed a volume of Ferrater’s Les dones i els dies (Women and Days), Heaney wrote the preface, though the book did not see the light of day till after my father’s death in 2004. In it Heaney writes fondly of ...”

“... contains poems by D.J. Enright and Jerzy Peterkiewicz (not the best work of either) and stories by Philip Roth and the editor on what might have been: a Kafka alive in America after the war, a bachelor schoolmaster; alive in the war and fighting with the partisans. These are not merely jeux d’esprit. By making us imagine what might have been, they lend depth ...”

“... love-object in The Tunnel does not become a rounded character in Castel’s account: which has led Gabriel Josipivoci to claim that ‘we get no sense of Maria as a living person, or of her husband or her lover.’ But if one grants the formal premise of a first-person narration by a crazed solipsist, whose sense of others as ‘living people’ is under ...”

“... happening at once, nobody has time to take much notice – this was all said in the 36 lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. While nobody would deny that Coover and his contemporaries opened our horizons twenty years ago, I would see Gerald’s Party as the work of a writer imprisoned in his own success. If this were to be the last of the ...”

“... for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine ...”

“... withdrawn again, as if revealing it were the ultimate presumption, the doctor’s first name: Gabriel. The notion of true wisdom confined in a truly private, inviolate life is always attractive, and doubly so when all around you – as on the radio and television in our day or in the coffeehouses of Vienna in the Thirties – is endless, self-promoting ...”

“... great social explorations of Doris Lessing or with the ludic excavations of Angela Carter. Or with Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez or Kingsley Amis. What now seems striking is how utterly beyond this Bainbridge was. If she is to be seen as part of any tradition it is one that is long-standing, wide-ranging, little ...”

“... Some time ago, Philip Roth remarked that his novels investigate ‘people in trouble’. Though much about his work has changed over the years, his fictional landscapes are still littered with human wreckage. Rage and lust, anxiety and melancholy are the dominant emotions, and all human impulses, even loyalty and affection, tend to career wildly out of control ...”

“... an hour before daybreak – are unsurpassable.In his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse, Philip Larkin included seven of Sassoon’s poems; only Yeats and Hardy had significantly more. True, Larkin’s anthology was denounced by Donald Davie and others as a counterblast against Modernism. But it can’t be denied that Sassoon’s war poems share with ...”

“... Rossetti herself said that her poem was not to be taken as an allegory. Her brother, Dante Gabriel, whose illustration shows the two sisters sleeping in each other’s arms, was fascinated by the intensity of feeling between them. Children are disturbed by the sexual jostling of the goblins and by the sinfulness of the delicious. Henry ...”

“... offered the Polish crown: absurd, but can there be smoke without any fire whatsoever? In May 1575, Philip Sidney returned to Little England. If England was small beer, so was he, no baron but plain Mr Sidney. He was 20 years of age. Sidney’s career makes a bizarre episode in that endless saga which is Britain-in-Europe. To understand why so much was ...”