All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or...
As a novelist Giorgio Bassani is both allusive and elusive. Allusive, because he makes a habit of writing as if all the objects of his attention, from the topography of Ferrara, his hometown in...
Head down on the desk, he hides tears that force their way out, warping ink of words he can’t read.Isoglosses: smudges of dialect, script across areas of page, title deeds to land his...
Born on the Lower East Side in 1904 to immigrant Russian Jewish parents, Louis Zukofsky spent his entire life in New York City, reading and writing and doing as little else as possible. He was...
In his book Von der Einheit der Musik [‘The Oneness of Music’], Ferruccio Busoni devoted about one and a half pages to the piano under the heading: ‘Man achte das...
The opening story in James Kelman’s 1998 collection, The Good Times, is called ‘Joe Laughed’. It’s nine pages long and is told from the point of view of a boy who plays...
‘If the world could write by itself,’ Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this...
Even serious and persistent readers often say they can’t finish Salman Rushdie’s novels. His unfinishability has some obvious causes. Wearyingly encrusted description is the natural...
Manifestos deify this antithesis dialysis hysteria – Dadaist premed dictation is [Dada] in July After dinnership is re-gales with [Dadada-iste] laughter which duly persists – saddest...
What with all those Henrys being succeeded by all those other Henrys in the histories, and all those worryingly ghostly patriarchs looming over the tragedies – Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet,...
If we speak of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, we mean a collection with this name first published in 1609, when Shakespeare was 45 and most of his plays had been staged; he died only...
The low tide brings her in, scouring the surf-line for dogweed and jellies, stones coughed from the sea. What interests her more is the take of wood that she gathers for the fire. She knows how...
Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s....
The Antarctic Poetry School Historically, the absence of even one writer has been the least of the Antarctic School’s worries. Is its hallmark cool tone sustainable in today’s...
An old woman leans out of her window and, ‘because of her excessive curiosity’, leans too far: she falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. A second old woman leans out of her...
Dawn darkness is a bare blue light and there’s a sound coming at you, most likely brought on the wind from a hillside forest or nicked off the skim of the sea . . . So...
Nine hours’ drive east of Darwin, where the Northern Territory of Australia and Queensland meet, you will find the Gulf of Carpentaria, the sea that separates the top lip of the continent...
Sami in their tipis (‘Hilpes’?) Finmark in the fifties thick skin patched with thin skin needle holes under flaps pantiled almost a proggy, with the same skill as waterproof as my...