Nona Fernández was two years old in 1973, when a military junta overthrew Salvador Allende’s government. Like the narrator of The Twilight Zone, she spent her childhood oblivious to the murderous policies...
If you were to make a film of Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife, you’d need a lot of extras. In the novel’s public spaces, no one does anything remotely out of the...
One of the most important functions of an education in a humanities subject is to introduce students to worlds that are different from the one they think they know, and chronological and cultural distance...
When I try to remember what attracted me to The Daughter of Time when I was fifteen, I think it was probably this: Inspector Grant’s self-possession, his irony and savoir faire – and the hints of romantic...
Come, gin, you sharp-tongued thing, and sitwith me for the daily briefing. Out he slides,the ruffled slug, flanked by his advisers. He’s notquite not grinning. The three podiums are dominoes
Kafka’s language is extraordinarily plain and lucid – far more so than that of any other modern writer – but still full of mystery. We can be fairly sure that he is not quite saying what he seems...
Elizabeth Hardwick had a great command of pattern and some of her characterisations jingle like a good ad: Frost was ‘malicious and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’;...
Why is George Sanders’s work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point,...
here she comes, the Pythiacrabbed hands fusedto a narrow pair of follicles[of no precise origin]halts at the side of the gorgecramps over her swollen abdomen –her floral tube vomiting blood
Joan Didion understood the impression she made and knew how to use it. ‘My only advantage as a reporter,’ she wrote in the introduction to Slouching towards Bethlehem, ‘is that I am so physically...
Frank O’Hara wasn’t a poet to write about parents, siblings and a middle-class Irish-Catholic upbringing in Grafton, Massachusetts, or his military service in the Pacific during the Second World War....
On Percival Everett is routinely described as underrated or overlooked, an outsider, the creator of a body of work too eccentric or discomfiting or higgledy-piggledy to attract a readership, or retain...
Solomon’s SealShaded by the self-seeded hazelsIn a back corner of our garden,To the right of the flowering currantAn unexpected Solomon’s sealI want to show you. Does it matterWhy such...
People and things are included not because they happened, but because they are effective. The book doesn’t shrink down to Jane Feaver or ‘Jane Feaver’, but swells to encompass something I’d term...
before the storm isthe storm. Our waiting tunnelling outward, chewing at the as-yet-not-here, wild,& in it thenot-yet,that phantom, hovering, scribbling hints in the dusty airshafts where...
Yūko Tsushima’s fiction is often associated with the ‘I-novel’, a naturalistic, confessional form that emerged in the early 20th century, drawing on Japan’s diaristic traditions as well as Western...
Gay men beginning to act on their desires in the 1950s faced any number of difficulties and dangers but could benefit from a certain invisibility. Their status was unspeakable, but at least it was unspoken.
Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for T.S. Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters to Emily Hale sustained...