Literature & Criticism

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...

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...

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing...

A man is fishing under the iron bridge.If I watch him watching the water, I see he is lostin thought. His morning dream came with him.His children are soft-voiced with pain; the dreamis a wheel...

The short time they have been together, they have shared sex, the house and garden! – food and drink! – what some would consider freedom! – although this is probably the last...

filled the fields. The way forward filled with the wayback. Are those humans out there orjust hollows filled with mercury & ash.When it comes into view the mountain is cleaved open.The silver...

In The Lesser Bohemians, sex is where the narrative sits, not where it goes from time to time. It’s shown as part of people’s lives, as sex is. Sex in The City Changes Its Face is a different thing....

What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature...

From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film, Boccaccio has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means...