Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the...
Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, was on its 11th US printing by the end of the summer and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved...
Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a...
A new edition of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, by S. Douglas Olson, was published recently (Oxford, £65), in time for George Bush not to read it before he blunders into Iraq....
April of that year in the one country was unusually clear and with brisk northeasterlies ‘straight from the Urals’. Their ancient regent at long last succumbed and laid to rest after...
Mark Doty specialises in ekphrasis. The word once meant the description of a work of visual art within a poem, but has come to mean poetic description more generally. Sometimes Doty describes a...
At the end of the second chapter of Middlesex, the first chronologically, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, brother and sister, are dancing in the grape arbour outside their house in the village...
In his essay on Lancelot Andrewes, T.S. Eliot wrote about ‘relevant intensity’. Contemporary British and American writers are in love with what might be called irrelevant intensity....
I am your record-player, your idiot companion,/you glum I dumb you gay hey! hey! I go put Don Giovanni on/you break for lunch I break for lunch I stop
Those who argued that 11 September could change the direction of contemporary fiction soon had a facer. The Corrections, published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway...
A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in...
Millpoint throaty guzzler, wishful choker as dust films throat, to measure up, squalls with hooks and introversions, bale-hooks, moebius comeback though sharp and sliced from the same stretch, to...
I don’t understand your faces, I don’t understand them. At night I stand at the back of the theatre. I watch you suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour in a weird kind of...
‘Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells...
Tim Winton’s new novel is a love story that comes out of a background of isolation and accident. Georgie Jutland, a fortyish ex-nurse from a good family, has got herself into a three-year...
Nick McDonell’s first novel (written, in case you haven’t read a newspaper recently, when he was 17) is set on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and focuses on a group of teenagers...
Why does the horse stand there staring at the horizon? Is it waiting on some rider arriving by car from the airport? Isn’t its grass enough for it and the freedom of the field? Oblivious to...
The linguist Ole Stig Andersen was keen to seek out the remaining traces of a West Caucasian language called Ubykh. Having heard that there was one remaining speaker he set out to find the man...