Literature & Criticism

Counting came first,then worry.Was someone missing?‘First’ came afterwards.                *Worry came...

The Danish writer​ Olga Ravn has recently published two short novels, one set in the future and one in the past. Both concern insular societies whose members turn on one another with fatal consequences....

OublietteIn the years of dark listeningto what lay between the seen and the saidI might catch a true thoughtjust as her mind forced it so far downthat it passed through the floor of herselfand...

More than one variety of omniscience is on show in Saraswati. What is referred to as an omniscient narrator is usually one able to slip in and out of the minds of a modest number of characters, something...

Who​ was English; who was American? If Auden was English, was T.S. Eliot American? Or was it the other way around? Eliot’s own reply in 1953 was: ‘I do not know whether Auden is to be considered...

‘Who’s afraid of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya?’ was the title of an essay that appeared in a Russian émigré literary journal in 1984. Petrushevskaya’s stories – short tales of doomed romance and...

Reading the work​ that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of her inquiry. If much of her writing sounds like the apotheosis of Eliotic impersonality,...

1breakfast is ready Dadhappy birthday to you it’s not my birthdayyou better get a move on sit down Dadwho’s been using my razor you don’t have a razorwhy don’t you just...

The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous. Drop a pin on the map, anywhere on the map, and that’s...

Driving from Durrus to Ballydehobto see for myself the family farmhousethey burned my grandmother out ofa hundred years ago the hedgerowon my right gives way to intermittentflashes of the lovely...

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye activates and resists our expectations about testimony, confessionalism, narrative access; our presumption that we know just how the accent is falling...

Cé​sar Vallejo is Yeats’s poet with the sword upstairs. Everything about him seems to burn with intensity. He burned through zarzuela Spanish, making it into a language of monosyllables, blurts, inventions,...

Robert Frost’s poetry has a way of lifting its gaze – with a heightening of register, a grand image, a weighty allusion – and seeming to dare you to shake your head in disbelief. ‘You think this...

I took off my glasses& pocketed them.I took out my eyes& tossed them upfor the crows to catch& turn tonotes. I feltthe wind. The one crowlanding on the rankingbranch. Staringat me....

In Ruth, Kate Riley layers two views of the church: on the one hand, a hidden but unquestionable authority, ‘like some pulsing larval queen’; on the other, a fretful collective of brothers and sisters...

Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was...

I’m glad he’s gone my father said.But that was the beginningOf my obsession with garnets.He did cure my husband in the end,Just as I had jokingly wishedHoped requested. Begged,Prayed...

When Michael Clune’s character in Pan alights on Proust in the course of his daily writing practice, he learns a mode of ‘redescription’ for the narrative of his life. Clune is also describing his...