In the introduction to her new book, Touching Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that...
The Texas and Oklahoma panhandles are adjacent strips of high flat land sticking out across the base of the Great Plains. This overlooked territory is where Annie Proulx sets her fourth novel, a...
Sam Shepard found his stride in the mid-1970s, and for the next few years there seemed to be few places it couldn’t take him. He had already made a name for himself as an Off-Off-Broadway...
Prints The dollardom shore of big Lake Michigan finds him doing what he did as a boy by real seas, running alongside them: the land’s hem stitched, he’d look back upon a long beach...
Per le donne famiglia Paciotto-Piernera & Jeff-e The beauty – the way the swallows gather around the Duomo for a few moments at dusk then scatter, darting away across the Vale with its...
Milan Kundera’s novels are built around ideas – predicaments, particular emotions, even gestures – like cities around metro stops. His characters live as close to them as...
The Excavation Travelling ends. Fur’s losing condition. Brittle, each ginger hair-tip will snap. Rubbed patches appear on the rump as they squeeze into underground tunnels, flatten...
On the second day of the second month 2003 we were walking through Beeston – it looked that Sunday more like a wet Northern than a wet Midland town with big strange pollarded trees on both...
To be nothing but fire not even the fuel that feeds it wasn’t my father’s style. When the time came for him to die (of a cirrhotic liver caused by poisoned blood flushed through him...
Ian Gilmour’s deft and learned book is concerned with the lives of Byron and Shelley up to the morning on which Byron woke up and found himself famous. The poets weren’t to meet for...
Everybody Had Lost Track of Time The wide open door of a church. The parked hearse with bald tyres. The grandmother on the sidewalk Leaning on a cane and cupping her ear. The lodger no one has...
No Man’s Land: I Every day I walk this tightrope of tarmac, blown toppling in the wake of juggernauts. I walk it to learn the line of the road, to keep my place on it. When I was a lad my...
Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as...
‘He has enormously increased the difficulties of being a novelist.’ Perhaps only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann...
Story of a Man last time a man was sealed in skin like an inspoken word sealed in it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering and he could just make out the fluttering light...
Old men can be buggers at hanging on. Hamish Henderson, who died last March at the age of 82, hung on firmly through three books, edited by others: his writings on ‘Song, Folk and...
Nicola Barker usually stages her plots in suburbs or on islands. Behindlings is set on Canvey, a suburban island. The protagonist, Wesley, is either the leader or the target of what may or may...
Fishing at the Falls Beer is cold in the water A breeze is cold behind us, A draught from shadow, where it Is cavelike, the wall eaten under, A moody huddling, where rock Has fallen from the...