Willie Chandran, full name Willie Somerset Chandran, is the son of a somewhat eccentric minor official in an Indian state. The novelist, conscientiously researching his final masterpiece, The...
He looks eerily young, what’s left of him, purged, somehow, back into boyhood. It is difficult not to watch the movie on TV at the foot of his bed, 40ll colour screen, a jailhouse dolly...
The advantage of a story set in wartime is that all the characters are obliged to form a relationship with death. Death is the life and soul of the war party. You can get death to come to parties...
False Spring A lift in the weather: a clemency I cling to like the legend of myself: self-exiled, world-wounded, god of evenings like this, eighty degrees and half a world away. * All night, the...
Reading depends on memory: when one thing reminds you of another, however vaguely, both make sense. Even when the devil is in the plot, memory counts: the detective reminds the house party that...
In Gun, with Occasional Music, the erasure of the individual memory is the final stage in a process that began with the elimination of the public record, of newspapers and books. Lethem’s dystopia...
Last year, 116,415 new books were published in the UK, of which 10,860 were works of fiction. Even reading at a rate of one novel or collection of short stories per day, it would take you 29...
In January 1957 the New York Police Department arrested a man called George Metesky, whose activities over the previous 16 and a bit years had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Mad...
It was said that The Little Red Book had ‘supplied the breath of life to soldiers gasping in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau; enabled workers to raise the sinking city of Shanghai...
Freezing out of season with Eid after Easter – a provisional city a concatenation of loose roundabouts building sites...
In March 1815, Madame d’Arblay, the woman we know better as Fanny Burney, was forced by the arrival of Napoleon from Elba to flee Paris and to leave behind almost all her possessions....
In Nani Power’s novel Crawling at Night, Katsuyuki Ito has only been in New York, his new home, for a few months. On the surface, his life in the United States is exactly the same as it was...
The Late Game That sleepwalking waiter Carrying a tower of plates Is he coming to our table, Or is he going to walk right out of the door? He’s going to walk right out of the door. A...
In the obituaries of R.K. Narayan (1906-2001), written by the ‘talkative men’ of modern India who once knew the writer slightly or quite well, there were one or two remarks about his...
Ignazio Silone was one of Italy’s most respected 20th-century novelists. His best-known work, Fontamara, is a dramatic account of peasant life in the Abruzzi, where he was born in 1900. He...
‘I learned to ski in prison,’ Gregory Corso wrote, having discovered that there’s nothing much for prisoners to do except imagine, fantasise and, what often follows, masturbate....
How you do go on About the politics Of Stockholm – About how too controlled, Too predictable Are the politics of Stockholm; How the politics of Stockholm Are like the citizens of Stockholm,...
‘The nearest approach to this,’ I said, ‘would be a Vermeer.’ Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was trebly gifted – with the vision that perceives the...