Literature & Criticism

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 filthy and genuinely transgressive Love Junkie, but if you were a PR strategist planning to resurrect a literary career, you would be right to start with a scholarly romp about an American president rather than the story of a rich housewife who stores used jockstraps in her freezer. 

Read more about Jockstraps in the Freezer: On Robert Plunket

Emerson’s Scepticism

Michael Ledger-Lomas

26 September 2024

‘Yesterday night at fifteen minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.’ He gave up ‘his little innocent breath like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous . . .

Domenico Starnone’s ‘Via Gemito’

Thomas Jones

26 September 2024

‘Operai che pranzano (I bevitori)’ by Federico Starnone (1953), by permission of the Comune of Positano. Photo © Vito Fusco. It’s​ an uncompromising way to start a novel: ‘When my father told . . .

Wilfred Owen’s Letters

Mark Ford

26 September 2024

In July​ 1917, shortly after his arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital for neurasthenic officers on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Wilfred Owen drafted the first of the five poems published during his lifetime . . .

On Camille Ralphs

Ange Mlinko

26 September 2024

In the Met Cloisters​ in Manhattan, in a gallery of illuminated manuscripts, are Gothic reliefs of boxwood and bone, some so tiny that magnifying lenses must have been used to carve them. One such boxwood . . .

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.

Read more about Fairy Flight in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

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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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...

Read more about I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

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,...

Read more about On V.R. Lang

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’

Isn’t that . . . female? My Dame Antonia

Patricia Lockwood, 20 June 2024

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...

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On Getting the Life You Want

Adam Phillips, 20 June 2024

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?

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Every Watermark and Stain: Faked Editions

Gill Partington, 20 June 2024

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.

Read more about Every Watermark and Stain: Faked Editions

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...

Read more about How to Speak Zazie: Translating Raymond Queneau

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,...

Read more about Knitted Cathedral: Rachel Cusk's 'Parade'

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...

Read more about Havering and Wavering: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Long Island’

On Donna Stonecipher

Maureen N. McLane, 23 May 2024

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.)...

Read more about On Donna Stonecipher

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.

Read more about Put on your clown suit: Percival Everett’s ‘James’

Like a Club Sandwich: Aztec Anachronisms

Adam Mars-Jones, 23 May 2024

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...

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