Literature & Criticism

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...

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...

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.

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....

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...

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...

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...

‘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,...

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?...

I am not sure if A.S. Byatt has had a worthy encomium; nor am I sure that I am the one to give it to her. I do know that she is too little read, not quite respected. Some of this is due to the widely...

Pragmatism wants us to ask, what is the life we want – or think we want? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask, why do we not want to know what we want?

With scores of copies of each book, many in the world’s most prestigious libraries, Thomas James Wise had put more than a thousand individual fakes into circulation. It was forgery on an industrial scale.

Queneau recognised a gulf between literary French and the contemporary spoken language: ‘I came to realise that modern, written French must free itself from the conventions that still hem it in.’ What...

Is Rachel Cusk’s ​new book a novel, a series of essays or a philosophical inquiry? Parade sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written,...

So much in Long Island goes unsaid. It’s a world in which people speak knowledgeably (and sometimes bitchily) about others but reveal little of themselves. As well as secrets, there are problems of...

These days prose poetry often appears, in anglophone poetry at least, as one option among many: free verse, formal verse, prose poetry, erasure poetry, whatever – it’s all good! (It’s not all good.)...

In Mark Twain’s novels, slaves are freed out of Christian charity – someone remembers them in a will. Percival Everett’s plots are more likely to hinge on the use of firearms.

After the moment in You Dreamed of Empires that brings together Moctezuma and Marc Bolan, Álvaro Enrigue has nowhere to go but into reverse. You can’t reinflate a popped balloon, but you can reinstate...