Literature & Criticism

Janet Frame’s Place

Lucie Elven

8 May 2025

There were her nicknames: Nini with the nits at home as a child, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the grande dame of New Zealand letters.

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Hanne Ørstavik’s ‘Stay with Me’

Sarah Resnick

8 May 2025

In Hanne Ørstavik’s​ novel Ti Amo (2020), the narrator, an unnamed Norwegian writer, finds her life structured by the rhythms of illness. Her husband, the Italian publisher of her books, was diagnosed . . .

What William Morris Wanted

Michael Ledger-Lomas

8 May 2025

Dante Gabriel Rossetti​ could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which . . .

‘The Place for Love in Human Life’

Diane Williams

17 April 2025

His spaniel was up on its hind legs, paws on his master’s belly, where my paws happily had lately been.He was my host, and I ate his food, while others there were still at it, too, and the plate set . . .

On Dino Buzzati

Michael Wood

17 April 2025

Dino Buzzati​’s novel The Singularity was published in Italian in 1960 but set in 1972. Just a small leap into the future, but far enough for the second date to be that of Buzzati’s death. A coincidence . . .

Malfunctioning Sex Robot: Updike Redux

Patricia Lockwood, 10 October 2019

When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women.

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Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.

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Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.

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Le pauvre Sokal: the Social Text Hoax

John Sturrock, 16 July 1998

Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the LFF,...

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The Fatness of Falstaff

Barbara Everett, 16 August 1990

One day early in the 1590s a clown came onto a London stage, holding a piece of string. At the end of the piece of string was a dog. The dog, possibly the first on the Elizabethan stage, I want to...

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Paul de Man’s Abyss

Frank Kermode, 16 March 1989

Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces...

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Diary: On the Booker

Julian Barnes, 12 November 1987

The only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It is El Gordo, the Fat One, the sudden jackpot that enriches some plodding Andalusian muleteer.

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Sounding Auden

Seamus Heaney, 4 June 1987

Hard-bitten, aggressively up-to-date in the way it took cognisance of the fallen contemporary landscape, yet susceptible also to the pristine scenery of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon England, Auden’s original voice could not have been predicted and was utterly timely.

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Fairy Flight in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

William Empson, 25 October 1979

So the working fairy does at least half a mile a second, probably two-thirds, and the cruising royalties can in effect go as fast as her, if they need to. Puck claims to go at five miles a second, perhaps seven times what the working fairy does. This seems a working social arrangement.

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This is Alia Trabuco Zerán’s true subject: the psychological effect of being treated as an implement rather than a person. When Estela first enters her room off the kitchen, she sits on the narrow bed...

Read more about Fistful of Dirt: Alia Trabucco Zerán’s ‘Clean’

Playboy was published in France in 2018 and was seized on by critics, and the public, as a powerful challenge to conservative views on gender and the proper place for women. But it isn’t clear that the...

Read more about Rolex and Ladurée: Constance Debré’s Bravado

Hair-splitting: Versions of Marx

Peter E. Gordon, 3 April 2025

Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...

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The sheer quantity and variety of Gallant’s output is fascinating. She’s dislocated, a traveller, eager for clues, hungry to read the worlds she’s passing through. Through her cast of diverse characters,...

Read more about Packing Like a Fury: Marvellous Mavis Gallant

Beyond Gurnah’s postcolonial perspective is an understanding of the trauma all people suffer when they’re sundered from what they know. His own uprooting came at the age of eighteen, when he flew with...

Read more about Swagger for Survival: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Theft’

Donne’s triumphant ‘Death, thou shalt die’ has nothing on the apophatic reversals of László Krasznahorkai’s metaphysics, where art exposes the scrim between us and non-being.

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Going with the Gush: Unfunny Valéry

Michael Hofmann, 20 March 2025

Would it have made a difference to read Monsieur Teste earlier? I have always had a taste for not-quite-novels, but I suspect this would always have been too much of a not-quite-a-not-quite-novel for...

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Itch to Shine: Austen’s Suitors

Freya Johnston, 20 March 2025

The main business​ of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more...

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In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men...

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Two Poems

Paula Bohince, 20 March 2025

EcologicWhat are those glassine circles? Lunaria? Wafer,glissade, waft? Is to name a thing to take its Latinate and translatebackwards? Components, sheen and mother-lustre, an ideal array of pills...

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All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It...

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What Brutal Days: On Dionne Brand

Andrea Brady, 6 March 2025

Dionne Brand writes about pain, but her poems use obscurity and abstraction to keep lyric intimacy at bay. This extends to their multiple first-person subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the...

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It’s​ a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. Joyce talked...

Read more about Will I, Won’t I? Dostoevsky’s Kiss

All of David Szalay’s stories point up the body’s indifference to the plans the will seeks to impose, its capacity to torment a person with inappropriate desire, or to carry on regardless of success...

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On ‘NLR’

Jeremy Harding, 20 February 2025

In general, New Left Review is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical about the winners of the day, especially if they happen to be Labour or the Democrats. One envies...

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The Stepdaughter (1976), Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine...

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I must divorce! On Vigdis Hjorth

Toril Moi, 6 February 2025

Women who write ​about women drinking and writing and sleeping around have until recently been dismissed as less serious, less ‘universal’, than men who write about men drinking and writing and sleeping...

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Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell, 6 February 2025

Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is a built on a hegemony of acquisition....

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