Literature & Criticism

I took off my glasses& pocketed them.I took out my eyes& tossed them upfor the crows to catch& turn tonotes. I feltthe wind. The one crowlanding on the rankingbranch. Staringat me....

Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was...

I’m glad he’s gone my father said.But that was the beginningOf my obsession with garnets.He did cure my husband in the end,Just as I had jokingly wishedHoped requested. Begged,Prayed...

When Michael Clune’s character in Pan alights on Proust in the course of his daily writing practice, he learns a mode of ‘redescription’ for the narrative of his life. Clune is also describing his...

He was holding up his shoe, inspecting the sole of it, and barely balancing on one leg, when I first saw him. I had asked him about the shoes – and he said any sort would do – that it...

For Jorie Graham, the teeming possibilities of lyric – tense and mood, syntax and sound crossed with layout and measure – harbour a fullness of time which is neither mere chronology nor novelistic...

A version in Scots of a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of love and war, attributed to the priestess Enheduanna of Ur (fl. 2255 BCE), the world’s earliest identifiable author. As well as...

Virginia Woolf admired Jane Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is collected’ – as it arises out of and then subsides back into...

Comedy can mean either the active incitement of laughter or a set of literary conventions. If a fair proportion of Kiran Desai’s Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is comedy in the first sense, all of it...

Gustave Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by Michel Lévy. The relationship, as established by Flaubert, was quite straightforward:...

morning mist and cloudfaint on the mountaina god is moving his faceover the waters a godin the cleft in the pass up theghyll the scramblers maketheir way also up –yesterday  ...

It can’t have been hard for Susan Choi to hit on the title of her novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Flashlights show the way; they expose dark corners; in the right hands they’re...

Autumn cyclamen,booby-trapping underfootlike a mistimed spring,clutch of shame’s blushes,flock of flamingos balancedon slender stemwareor mad flight of hats,magenta origami,by...

Ben Pester’s Expansion Project is not a cheerful book, but it is a funny one. The corporate attempt to suppress and compartmentalise human feeling is repeatedly shown to be laughable. But pain is non-compliant;...

I don’t think there’s anyone on today’s bestseller lists as accomplished on the page as Elmore Leonard was; he had the extraordinary ability to evoke a place with the sparsest of descriptions and...

Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit...

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.              Dream of the...

Dream Count is a product of Adichie’s more ambivalent African feminism. The novel is written entirely from the perspective of women, but their primary interest appears to be their relationships with...