Literature & Criticism

Georgi Gospodinov​ was 22 when Bulgarian communism collapsed in early 1990. ‘The end of our training,’ he has written, ‘coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.’ In his first...

Detective novels offer a means of rehearsing the fearful reality of death, and in this sense the conventions of the genre, with its distracting intellectual puzzles, is a kind of play. A capacity to balance...

A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, Whitman announces in the first pages of Specimen Days: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous,...

Detail validates a fiction, giving the impression of a world that can be priced and measured, touched and tasted. But for some writers it’s more than ballast – it represents priceless cargo, and the...

Macunaíma has become a myth. It says something complicated about Brazil, but also about what modernism meant. And eventually it made me admire Mário​ de Andrade’s decision to look back on his modernist...

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,...

The difficulty of being in contact with ‘the truth about yourself’ is a theme that runs through Ørstavik’s work. In her three earlier novels translated into English, the protagonists are often thwarted...

William Morris wrote with appalling fluency. Composing verse on trains or while sat at the loom, he could turn out a thousand lines a day. One friend used to stab herself with pins to stay awake during...

It is time to consult my friendsthe historians who still believein research and a tapestry of factwoven on the loom of deliberationand hypotheticals testedagainst what are perceivedto be outcomes....

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...

In a late interview Dino Buzzati offered his theory of a secular form of original sin. ‘The human being is a malformation of nature … It is a mistaken creature … unhappy by definition.’ This is...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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.

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...