On BookTok the cycle goes: rating books, simping over them, bringing ‘overrated’ books down a peg, and then rehabilitating them when the backlash goes too far. But there is a worry that we’re...
Nettel is a mother, and she seems to be saying that ‘normal mothers’ do think ugly thoughts – or rather, that there is no such thing as a ‘normal mother’. There is a strong...
Who or what was Rimbaud? What is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live...
Toni Morrison is not envious of her characters. They are not punished for the qualities she has given them. Pride does not always come before a fall. Beauty is not bestowed so it might be marred or destroyed....
Jon Fosse doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so...
More interesting than the sentimental evocation of reading as an activity that sets lonely children apart is the conception of authors as would-be ushers of the apocalypse. That books themselves are pregnant...
‘Like having my skull opened with a tin-opener,’ Angela Carter said about reading Baudelaire as a teenager. Discovering the Claudine books, even at my age and with my Bataille phase far behind...
Alessandro Manzoni was born in 1785, the only child of an arranged marriage between Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the Milanese intellectual Cesare Beccaria, and Pietro Manzoni, a minor nobleman....
The most common complaint about Dickens in his lifetime was that he exaggerated, that his characters were implausible specimens of humanity. Prince, too, was seen as going far beyond the norm, especially...
The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior weight and strength in order to tip them off-balance. Helen DeWitt has been talking in laconic for quite a while...
Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...
Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’...
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...
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...
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...