Elizabeth Hardwick had a great command of pattern and some of her characterisations jingle like a good ad: Frost was ‘malicious and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility...
Why is George Sanders’s work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At...
here she comes, the Pythiacrabbed hands fusedto a narrow pair of follicles[of no precise origin]halts at the side of the gorgecramps over her swollen abdomen –her floral tube vomiting blood
Joan Didion understood the impression she made and knew how to use it. ‘My only advantage as a reporter,’ she wrote in the introduction to Slouching towards Bethlehem, ‘is that I am...
Frank O’Hara wasn’t a poet to write about parents, siblings and a middle-class Irish-Catholic upbringing in Grafton, Massachusetts, or his military service in the Pacific during the Second...
On Percival Everett is routinely described as underrated or overlooked, an outsider, the creator of a body of work too eccentric or discomfiting or higgledy-piggledy to attract a readership, or retain...
Solomon’s SealShaded by the self-seeded hazelsIn a back corner of our garden,To the right of the flowering currantAn unexpected Solomon’s sealI want to show you. Does it matterWhy such...
People and things are included not because they happened, but because they are effective. The book doesn’t shrink down to Jane Feaver or ‘Jane Feaver’, but swells to encompass something...
before the storm isthe storm. Our waiting tunnelling outward, chewing at the as-yet-not-here, wild,& in it thenot-yet,that phantom, hovering, scribbling hints in the dusty airshafts where...
Yūko Tsushima’s fiction is often associated with the ‘I-novel’, a naturalistic, confessional form that emerged in the early 20th century, drawing on Japan’s diaristic traditions...
Gay men beginning to act on their desires in the 1950s faced any number of difficulties and dangers but could benefit from a certain invisibility. Their status was unspeakable, but at least it was unspoken.
Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for T.S. Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters to Emily Hale sustained...
How often has a book of poetry scared you? Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, £12.99), with its barbs and quips and dry double meanings, suggests...
I have circulated among its many rooms over the weeks, the seasons and yearsimpelled, one might argue, more by circumstance or chance than predilection.Though long ago converted into apartments,...
Toy theatres reproduced specific productions, but the early ones required considerable imagination on the part of the purchaser. They offered an unadapted play text, a selection of scenes and some, but...
Like all Claire Keegan’s books, it slips down easily, weaving a character’s idiom – ‘he could not say which he rathered’ – in and out of the narrative. It doesn’t...
The most bizarre aspect of the ‘quotation’ as we now understand it is that words uttered by King Lear when he’s mad are ascribed to Shakespeare, and that words attributed with some irony...
Yoga, whose New Agey message wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970s, is about the struggle to accept the fact that you can’t mute your ego, either in the interest of peace and love,...