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.
The stories in Colin Barrett’s first book, Young Skins (2013), assembled a shabby cast of bouncers and pool sharks, small-time gangsters and big-time losers from a dismal Irish town. The...
Our interest in historical works always seems dependent on something extra-aesthetic: on the questions posed by the history books, for example (what were Hitler or Stalin really like?); on this or that . . .
Returning home from evening massin the big car,they were like canal boats thensliding through the loose gravel, in the back seatshe pushed my cuticles upwith a silver file not unpainfullyto expose the . . .
For scholars of heartbreak and trepidation, the Dolly Parton songbook is a core text. No other singer would say ‘please’ when begging Jolene not to take her man. In Country Music, Ken Burns’s . . .
ex-lover 1ex-lover 21 you smell damp, is it raining?2 nice and dry in here1 two hundred seats not even half full2 Japanese film week?1 funny how Americans dislike subtitles2 you said this one’s a film . . .
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 Stevie Smith.
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 work of Seamus Heaney
In the concluding episode of their acclaimed series, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford confront Robert Lowell.
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 discuss the work of W. H. Auden with reference to pieces from the LRB.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of A.E. Housman.
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 poetry of Thomas Hardy in the latest in their series of discussions on 20th century poets.
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.
To belong to the city in this way is to anonymise oneself and slip out of the constraints of gender. Lisa Robertson has always been interested ‘in whatever mobilises and rescues the body’, including...
Jules Renard was a brilliant noticer of things. Distinguishing quirks and concrete observations usually take precedence over broader typologies. ‘The man of science generalises,’ he wrote, ‘the artist...
Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a...
Age: 22. Time: after 2. RumblingOn western skyline, barrage, tangled tracks, trucks,Jeeps, flags, signposts, dust, oily rags, lorries tumblingOver dark crests, pulverised surface almost liquid,...
The romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. It asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary...
All novels are experiments, but the thing that separates a thriller (or any other form with its own section in the bookshop) from ‘literature’ is whose constraints carry the most weight: the market’s,...
Shelley’s poetry is full of supernatural phenomena, ‘spirits of the air,/And genii of the evening breeze’. It’s possible to account for them through reference to classical models, but it’s also...
Words, Isidore Isou thought, had done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, he hoped to make space for a new language to emerge....
Vagabonds! tells compelling stories of survival, about women seizing agency in spite of the forces ranged against them. Men are largely incidental in this brave new world, when they aren’t in the way....
Elif Batuman writes brilliantly about what it is like to be inside a body newly being touched, and touching. Even though novels aren’t actually guidebooks, it does feel like the truth is being verified...
If there are other writers who competed as professional runners, I’m not aware of them. (Samuel Beckett was a good sprinter but that was in his schooldays.) To A.E. Coppard, the importance of running...
Two years after Sam Selvon’s book was published, the racial divisions that plagued West London culminated in the Notting Hill riots. The fighting began in August 1958 when a group of Teddy Boys saw a...
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s diaries and letters demonstrate over and over again how important it was to her that she immerse herself in a milieu or environment. She felt identity above all as a relation....
There are questions about agency and chance that impinge on the way Trespasses is put together. The conventionality of Louise Kennedy’s ‘forbidden love’ plot – Catholic woman falls in love with...
Maryse Condé’s books don’t try to reconcile the antagonism between commitment and irony. ‘Never solidarity before criticism,’ Edward Said wrote, but what function does this puckishness serve today?...
Psalm 139:23At one time,when there might have been a God,everything vaguelyconvent, dovesand serpents in the Treeof Knowledge, gospelwhispered down the galleriesof rain,I would have been awake for...
Potomac River, 1982where I grew upit was all wonderful anddefensivethe adults were kindand never neglectfulbringing fresh water andgrapes oranges and juiceand sunscreen always askingeach kid what...
It’s tempting to read They as a timely intervention in our own culture wars, even in respect of its title. The likes of Nadine Dorries wouldn’t recognise themselves as the enemy. But if obliged to...
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