Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction...
Comparisons to Proust and Henry James come up a lot when critics discuss Javier Marías, but we could also see his style, his performance, as something akin to a too-late Balzac, aided perhaps by a disciple...
The conceit of the novel is that it is a fictional biography, with fake footnotes, but real endnotes that reveal the sources Catherine Lacey used to create X, her wife and the world she lived in.
I think I should go in and see her. Can I stand it. She is shaking. No doubt. I should go in. She’ll be pouring another glass. It stops the shaking. No doubt. She’ll be sitting in...
In Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s characters keep fabricating their own versions of reality, but their inventions are boxed in: lies, casting after ordinary plausibility, tend to resemble one another...
In The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon wants to show how the monolithic lays waste to the macaronic – and how the macaronic, in the form of the resilient Pinto, manages to survive. Yet...
Mary Renault’s novels manifest an unfashionably unabashed admiration for male heroism and an intense pleasure in male beauty and physicality. She didn’t mind that male readers and reviewers constantly...
Jane Bowles’s characters are obsessed with sin and salvation, though they often confuse them. She was drawn towards things she found incomprehensible and, particularly, towards things she feared. What...
Perhaps by making pain formal, or rendering it as a joke, Diane Seuss also makes it tolerable. If frank: sonnets is haunted by corpses, the poet’s own body is also an abiding concern throughout: ‘There...
The terror that Mariana Enríquez works with depends precisely on her refusal of repression. In her fiction, blood isn’t spattered off screen. It’s splurged all over the picture. And so Our Share of...
Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy.
George Sand found the tall, slim Musset, with his fashionably dishevelled blond hair, more agreeable than she had expected. He wrote poems for her and sent her sketches. There was no talk of love. On the...
Calling something a festival is no guarantee it will actually become festive in the deep sense. Some Sundays, like some festivals, are exercises in niche connoisseurship more than genuine enthusiasm. Others...
Many maps have been offered over the years to assist the reader-quester, but if somebody gets a map out in one of Auden’s poems it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In one lyric a lover...
Siblings is like a book from a lost civilisation. It comes with four pages of endnotes, which these days is unheard of in fiction. This bespeaks the arcaneness of the so-called Dreibuchstabenstaat, ‘three-letter...
Namwali Serpell’s aesthetic preference is to break a pattern almost before she has established it, to load, aim and cock a symbol but not pull the trigger. In The Furrows, the nexus between disaster,...
If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking...
Russell Banks admitted that he wrote about the sort of people who voted for Trump; those were the people he came from. He wanted them to understand themselves better. But that didn’t mean he was an...