Literature & Criticism

Delmore Schwartz (Image courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Delmore Schwartz’s Decline

Joanne O’Leary

11 November 2024

After the publication of Schwartz’s first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum himself sent words of admiration: ‘I want to see more poetry from you.’

Read more about I eat it up: Delmore Schwartz’s Decline

Cosy Crime

Thomas Jones

11 November 2024

In​ the mid-1980s, before they moved to London and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ . . .

On Yoko Tawada

Adam Thirlwell

11 November 2024

In the era​ of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought . . .

Alberti and the Ancients

Anthony Grafton

11 November 2024

Late in the​ 1460s, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a book on ciphers. It was a dialogue between him and a longtime friend, Leonardo Dati, who had recently been made head of the papal secretariat. Like many . . .

On Gillian Rose

Jenny Turner

7 November 2024

Suppose​ a friend you trust more than any other, who taught you the meaning of friendship, lets you down suddenly, and then persistently ceases to fulfil the expectations you have come to have of them . . .

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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Infinite Walrus: On Eley Williams

Ange Mlinko, 24 October 2024

 As in dreams, Williams’s surrealism and sundry rabbit holes don’t need to violate the laws of physics to create distinctive, inviting worlds populated by exuberant eccentrics. A yawn, a laugh, an...

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Prawns His Sirens: Novel Punctuation

Adam Mars-Jones, 24 October 2024

Layout on the​ page is a larger affair than mere punctuation, but punctuation, the set of interruptions that promotes flow, has its own set of powers. It is assumed to be a relatively trivial matter,...

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That Guy: On Binyavanga Wainaina

Jeremy Harding, 24 October 2024

Binyavanga Wainaina belonged to a second-wave, post-independence cohort that could put the past – and the Cold War – behind them without feeling they’d lost track of history: it was Africa’s moment...

Read more about That Guy: On Binyavanga Wainaina

Cristina Campo hated modern mass society and detested contemporary Italian literature and art. She considered the world in which she was condemned to live irredeemably ugly. I don’t think I have ever...

Read more about No Rain-Soaked Boots: On Cristina Campo

Can an eyeball have lovers? Emerson’s Scepticism

Michael Ledger-Lomas, 26 September 2024

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

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Sunday Best: Wilfred Owen’s Letters

Mark Ford, 26 September 2024

It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...

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Jockstraps in the Freezer: On Robert Plunket

Kevin Brazil, 26 September 2024

Thanks to New Directions, Plunket’s two novels are now back in print. On its reissue last year, My Search for Warren Harding was hailed as a comic masterpiece all over again. It’s not as funny as the...

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On Camille Ralphs

Ange Mlinko, 26 September 2024

After You Were, I Am was at least a decade in the making, and the strength of the poetry is a measure of the crisis it confronts. Given complete freedom, a tabula rasa, how does a poet begin? And even...

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Euripides Unbound

Robert Cioffi, 26 September 2024

One of the papyri excavated by the archaeologist Heba Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries...

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The desire, and ability, to recreate the world around them in accordance with their will is a trait that narcissists, tyrants and artists have in common, and the narrator’s father in Via Gemito is...

Read more about Impossibly, a Peacock: Domenico Starnone’s ‘Via Gemito’

Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that...

Read more about Use your human mind! Rachel Kushner’s ‘Creation Lake’

Putting stand-up at the heart of a campus novel allows Camille Bordas to highlight the awkward fit between the modern university, with its risk-averse corporate structures, and creative work.

Read more about Egg-Lemon Soup: Camille Bordas’s ‘Material’

James wanted every sentence to be artful. What he could often forget, later in life, is that some sentences just need to say what they need to say. But the prefaces are by no means all mannerism and circumlocution....

Read more about Just say it, Henry: Henry James’s Hot-Air Balloon

There aren’t many novels to which the title Choice could not be attached, and it isn’t clear what makes it particularly appropriate here, shorn of an article, as stark as an abstract noun can be. The...

Read more about Poor Sasha, Poor Masha: Neel Mukherjee’s Pessimism

I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

Sophie Lewis, 1 August 2024

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

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On Monica Youn

Stephanie Burt, 1 August 2024

The guiding consciousness of From From feels quadruply alienated: Monica Youn is not fully or comfortably American, not Korean, not an immigrant, permitted neither to see herself as a victim nor to take...

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On V.R. Lang

Mark Ford, 4 July 2024

‘First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche,...

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Groff is not telling a new story – in fact, it’s a very old one – but it’s inflected by the anxieties and politics of the present moment. Would it have been better if humans just … vanished?...

Read more about Bears in Awe: Lauren Groff’s ‘The Vaster Wilds’

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