Literature & Criticism

The narrator​ of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s pair of novels, The Sympathiser (2015) and The Committed, is one of the more irresistible characters in recent American fiction. He smokes, he drinks,...

In​ the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’...

Are weextinct yet. Who ownsthe map. May Ilook. Where is myclaim. Is my historyverifiable. Have Iincluded the memoryof the animals. The animals’memories. Are theystill here. Are wealone....

The Londoners of Keith Ridgway’s A Shock, who live in a part of the city roughly bounded by Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, suffer from a condition familiar to inhabitants of mighty, superficially...

Last Poemi.m. Derek MahonWe value them, the voicesthat need us least, who speakwith honest subtletyto ironies beyond us,who slip our grasp and gowhistling down endlesscelestial colonnadesof...

The war is over in A Passage North but its impact is still being felt; damaged limbs can be repaired or replaced with prosthetic ones but injuries to the mind persist. His character’s sufferings...

My brother’s words when I hear them these days seem not to go into my ears – but down some other deeper artery. He said, ‘It’s mother’s house and I just think of it...

The first true crime craze – the distant antecedent of our own docu-drama craze – proved to be an essentially Elizabethan phenomenon. I would place its high-water mark in the year 1599, when...

all daypersonifying plantsEvil NettleFascist Weedboing boingI do not want youmatter out of placeI rip you outI favour the desiredthe useful to me to me to me!meanwhile stars doing themselvesin the...

As someone who once never had to write down an appointment or a phone number, I take the inevitable weakening of memory that comes with ageing hard. A common response to I forget is Don’t worry,...

It’s characteristic of the perverse workings of the novel that Damon Galgut should insist on providing a trivial continuity immediately after he has erased a necessary one. If​ the domestic...

One​ of the last things Gertrude Beasley wrote before her disappearance in 1927 was an article called ‘I Was One of Thirteen Poor White Trash’. It came out in Hearst’s...

In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping. His characters are suspicious of any claim...

Ernaux hasn’t written about her life in a neat this-then-that sort of way. Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes...

In essays and interviews, Jonathan Franzen acknowledged that his over-full sentences and abstruse metaphors were intended to impress graduate students and his father. Money, fame, the imprimatur of Oprah’s...

Writing and rewriting the masque seems to have changed Milton’s idea of heaven. His early polemical works set a materialistic, selfish and appetitive clergy against the spiritual and chaste author,...

No one else of his generation can do as much as Cortney Lamar Charleston ​can with an XXL sentence or a series of puns. He revels in multiplicity, using hip-hop accelerations in one passage and gospel...

It’s hard to think of Richard Powers’s Bewilderment as a political novel, since most of its politics will be innocuous to any imagined audience. If you aren’t in favour of killing endangered...