Writing by Nobel Prize winners from the LRB archive: Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Hume, Nadine Gordimer and Amartya Sen.
Poetry can be a radical act of naming and misnaming, of bringing to light the awkward correlations between objects and words. Audre Lorde described it as ‘the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought’. Clifton’s reason for ‘the making of poems’ – ‘though I fail and fail/in the giving of true names’ – is that ‘I am adam and his mother/ and these failures are my job.’ This failure is categorically different from the misnaming that’s symptomatic of racism.
When his company commander vanished from the front line at the end of 2015, the Ukrainian conscript and novelist Artem Chekh was told he’d deserted and gone over to the enemy. Through the . . .
This morning I watched a video of some ducks eating lettuce from an enamel bowl. The text of the newspaper lining their cage indicated the birds were in Japan. They devoured the lettuce ferociously . . .
‘Didn’t I tell you,’ a character asks halfway through C. Pam Zhang’s first novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, ‘that you should always ask why a person is telling you . . .
In the mid-seventh century, a busy and well-connected abbess in Northumbria took a promising new poet under her wing. This unassuming elderly man, who worked as a cowherd, had never managed to learn . . .
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.
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.
Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.
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,...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Writing by Nobel Prize winners from the LRB archive: Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Hume, Nadine Gordimer and Amartya Sen.
Writing about Russian Americans by Jenny Turner, Hans Keller, Hari Kunzru, Christopher Reid, John Lanchester and Craig Raine.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, through the lens of the LRB archive.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, and the pieces about him in the LRB archive.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Philip Larkin, drawing on articles from our archive by contributors including Alan Bennett, Barbara Everett and John Bayley.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of W. H. Auden with reference to pieces from the LRB.
In the concluding episode of their acclaimed series, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford confront Robert Lowell.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the poetry of Thomas Hardy in the latest in their series of discussions on 20th century poets.
Mark Ford, Seamus Perry and Joanna Biggs consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of A.E. Housman.
Rainald Goetz isn’t much interested in telling tales of hedonistic excess. He’s not above namedropping, showing off about the DJs he was friends with and the cool clubs he went to, but...
Finishing Oblivion Banjo, I was left in a Wright-like quandary: ‘I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what.’ The book offers itself as ‘the perfect distillation’...
Kafka wrote that, were it not for the final act, Michael Kohlhaas would be ‘a thing of perfection’, which is a diplomatic way of saying that Kleist absolutely butchers it. In fact, one of the...
You might start reading her for the food and the celebrity gossip, but you reread for the thrilling materiality, ‘concrete and fastidious’, as she herself once suggested, of her prose:...
French is fancy and fashionable, but we aren’t going to fall for that. We have solid, stocky Saxon words to hand, verbal guarantees of a closeness to reality. Who needs ennui when we have old-fashioned...
‘He took stories apart and put them back together like toys,’ Gianni Rodari’s wife remembered in a rare interview. Often it seems the reassembly is an attempt to construct the kind of...
It may be inherently impossible to write a novel that openly poses such questions as whether robots can be said to have souls, or to be conscious, or capable of feeling love, or of inspiring and reciprocating...
Lawrence Osborne’s novels include all the props associated with thrillers: guns, heists, bribes, spiked drinks, assumed identities, ghostly visitations and suitcases stuffed with banknotes. But the...
Gimmickry is the séance during which some commodities, at least, have begun to dance as if of their own free will. Marx’s term for ‘of its own free will’ is ‘aus freien Stücken’...
Words, too, can mean opposite things. This is a minority interest among those who want language to communicate plainly, but it’s of consummate interest to poets. In the procedural poems, you see...
A remarkable number of scenes take place in the lavatory or on the way to it. We get milk stinking of mice, clothes reeking of paraffin and horse’s sweat, the musty odour of armpits and the ‘heavy...
Patricia Highsmith was able to dramatise the loss of control so shockingly because she knew how it felt. Though not herself a homicidal maniac (as far as one knows), she could imagine what it...
It’s a familiar paradox: in order to save herself, the writer needs to get away from her family; and yet when she sits down to write, the lost world of family is her best material – all those...
One of the inhabitants of Middle England, the title and the setting of Jonathan Coe’s last novel, part of a location that is also called ‘merrie’, ‘deep’ and...
The Aeneid is not all about male virtues and egos. The overall plot depends on the wrath of the goddess Juno, and room is also made for the quieter voices of aged fathers, local rustic deities and Italian...
In Hinton the non-appearance of a transcendent perspective does the book the great service of going against teleology, the sense of moving towards a predestined end that makes most historical novels so...
Stone’s dozen days in Saigon were all passed in the shadow of the war. Everybody was in it, somehow, and talked about it non-stop, but the talk never went anywhere. It ran into the war and came to...
Lila and Lenù. She and I. These friendships – these first, these formative friendships – are in part about adapting ourselves to our place in adult society. There is always one child...
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