As a detective you have to watch your step, in order that your operations remain clandestine, and no detectives in literature have ever watched their steps as literally as Okotie’s two detectives. Much...

The pleasures as much as the perils of adaptation led Elizabeth Bowen to suppose that the fundamental condition of human experience is a feeling of ‘amorphousness’ which prompts the ‘obsessive wish...

Claire-Louise Bennett doesn’t specify the kinds of stories that women might be desperate to cast off, but she doesn’t need to. Relationships, career, children, ‘creativity’. Whether we collapse...

The Book of Disquiet is almost about philosophy; its tone is often casual and then deliberate. Pessoa loves aphorism, and enjoys long, loose ruminations. He writes beautifully about weather; it seems constantly...

Here is what it is: no force on earth will keep a writer’s preoccupations out of their fiction. You are not necessarily looking for them, but you find them every time. There you are in your octagon,...

A good children’s writer makes children feel things without ever quite talking about feelings. They teach children how to read the world for signals of what is important and strange and valuable, but...

German language, Celan often said, was his mother’s tongue and the tongue of her murderers (‘Muttersprache und Mördersprache’). Writing poetry in German was for him both an act of remembrance and...

Writing from ‘an artificial paradise it is Hell to get into’, John Wieners channelled Baudelaire and aimed to ‘be the new Rimbaud, and not die at 37 but set the record straight’. He died in 2002,...

And where is Katharina? At her trial, the prosecution argues that there are evils and evils: complicated, faraway evils, such as war, which no municipal ruling can fix, and local, finite evils, such as...

Barbara Pym’s comedies are disenchanted romances. Her spinsters often marry but do so with their eyes open. Men, they realise, are best treated as children – helpless and often peevish. Eligible bachelors...

There’s always an audience if you’re someone with a smartphone, a social media influencer or just paranoid. But the lack of connection is not only a problem of address, but of artifice. Is the text...

Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the...

Whether he’s writing about holographic sex shows, or drywall and oven gloves, M. John Harrison is a psychological novelist whose fascination with trauma, repression and memory remains constant throughout...

Assembly takes a character who seems to have the best our society has to offer young women in the early 21st century – no surprise: it’s still money, status and love – and shows us why she still...

It would be a pusillanimous reader who could not respond to the appeal of a cosmos so complete in every detail, arrayed in such minute and magnificent order, and peopled with such wondrous creatures, from...

Is there a moral here about the futility of self-willed ‘identity’? Or is it a cautionary tale about the religion of achievement? Was Rich afraid that her deepest identity, that of a poet, would vanish...

What you get from David Storey’s memoir is a sense of the difficulty of the journey. He wanted to write about his own people and to place himself among them, and to go from there, and take them with...

Jhumpa Lahiri seems most assured in tight spaces. But although she often speaks of her desire for control, she acknowledges its unattainability. There’s a certain thrill in losing control, or in struggling...