Literature & Criticism

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...