Cloud-capped, deserted, building and building site Exchange whispers and winks. I glide half- Asleep down the alley between them, as if Adrift on some superannuated schooner. Nearby, on another...
In Broken April, a novel written in the late 1970s but set half a century earlier, Ismail Kadare describes the last thirty days of the life of a young man.* On the evening of 17 March, on a road...
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, moved with his family to Mexico City at the age of 15, and was inspired by the election of Salvador Allende to return to his native...
Department of Complaints Where you are destined to turn up Some dark winter day Walking up and down dead escalators Searching for someone to ask In this dusty old store Soon to close its doors...
What does it mean to live morally in an uncaring society? The question is deeply embedded in any culture that has an enduring creative legacy, and China is no exception. For some years,...
They’ve known each other, Joshua Spassky and Natalie, for five years, and have often met, as lovers. They last met at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; Joshua was over from the US rehearsing a...
The new Pickering and Chatto edition of the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell arrived just in time to mark a century since the publication of the previous standard text, A.W. Ward’s...
I Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell? What about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell us to use the terms alienable and inalienable to make this...
David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath (Regency dress parade, bonnet-making workshops, ‘Tea with Mr Darcy’), submitted opening chapters and plot synopses of...
This is a miniature dictionary of the invented English in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s charming, flawed and exhausting new novel: bik (Yiddish: bull) –...
Misha Vainberg, like a twisted 21st-century Whitman, contains multitudes. Son of the 1238th richest man in Russia. Graduate of Accidental College in the American Midwest, with a degree in...
During 2005, while Nigel Cliff was writing his wonderful book about the Astor Place riot, I too visited a couple of the archives he consulted, namely the New York Public Library for the...
Tate Water If you ask how a colour might come about consider the enigma of water determined by sky, and by water I don’t mean pool or rain barrel but the wide expanse of sea or lake. As...
It would be nice to say that Graham Greene just appeared one day in Yonda, the leprosy settlement in the Equateur Province of the then Belgian Congo where I was the doctor, stepping off the...
The confessional mode in literature has an uncomplicated appeal for both writers and readers: the unburdening of guilt, vicarious or otherwise. But as Tobias Wolff cautioned in his mordant memoir...
I The lake had been drained that night and filled with sky instead. We stood on the jetty as if on a summit, looking down on a fathomless depth of cloud. Sky overhead, sky at our feet like deep...
After great rain. Gradually you are revealing yourself to me. The lesson carves...
Of all the great English poets, Dryden must be the least enjoyed. Once honoured ‘rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away...