Walking I never run into anyone from the old days. It’s summer and I’m alone in the city. I enter stores, apartment houses, offices And find nothing remotely familiar. The trees in...
Nomi Nickel, the 16-year-old narrator of Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, is one of the damned. Abandoned by her family, betrayed by her boyfriend, shunned by her community, she sits...
The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’...
– something that comes from the dark (not self or non-self) but something between the two like the shimmering line where one form defines another yet fails to end; look for the proof in snow...
Fulcrum Press, a small poetry publisher, operated out of 20 Fitzroy Square in London between 1965 and 1972. I don’t know of a more important or influential publisher of poetry in recent...
Hilary Mantel’s dark, unsettling and gleefully tasteless new novel about spiritualism, Hell and the condition of contemporary England is part ghost story, part mystery, and as alarmingly...
Cynthia Ozick has been described as one of America’s best writers, one of its leading women of letters, the Athena of its literary pantheon. She has won prestigious awards by the armful:...
this 3 for 2 offer one’s not enough three you can’t carry / two they won’t let you the thing is impossible / leave it give up give it up
Tim Parks’s latest novel opens in the forests of the South Tyrol, where a group of white-water enthusiasts are taking a kayaking holiday. The river is overflowing with melt water from a...
Rilke: The Apple Orchard Come just after the sun has gone down, watch This deepening of green in the evening sward: Is it not as if we’d long since garnered And stored within ourselves a...
When I grew up, I wanted to work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Partly because of the name: an intriguing and exciting combination of the exotic and the everyday, the hi-tech and the homely,...
My Future – waiting for me somewhere out of sight past the betting shop and the Nationwide where buses stop to shiver in the middle of the night – doesn’t for a moment doubt...
When we discuss novels, there is nothing easier or harder to talk about than characterisation. Nothing easier, in that unprofessional readers’ expressions of interest or aversion so often...
Is anybody listening? This isn’t a question that detains most eminent Western writers of fiction, whose able conjurings of hot-air balloon disasters relived in appalled slow motion, or of...
In 1980, when she was in her late thirties, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping. Her way of seeing things seemed to have sprung from nowhere and was like no one...
All of Kazuo Ishiguro’s six novels are first-person narratives. For the most part the voices of these narrators are quiet, civilised, rather formal. This is so whether the speaker is the...
Insomnia Everywhere it’s raining except here where the mosquitoes thrive and the car alarms wail at each other all through the dog-moaning night, and just before dawn that smell of onions...
During my last reservist stint, in Ama Keng, that unmistakeable waft: like garbage and onions and liquid petroleum gas all mixed in one. We jerked our helmeted heads upward, and saw the spiky...