ex-lover 1ex-lover 21 you smell damp, is it raining?2 nice and dry in here1 two hundred seats not even half full2 Japanese film week?1 funny how Americans dislike subtitles2 you said this...
The stories in Colin Barrett’s first book, Young Skins (2013), assembled a shabby cast of bouncers and pool sharks, small-time gangsters and big-time losers from a dismal Irish town. The...
Returning home from evening massin the big car,they were like canal boats thensliding through the loose gravel, in the back seatshe pushed my cuticles upwith a silver file not unpainfullyto expose...
Novels are put together out of all kinds of raw material; they don’t really have the purity of the older genres. Rather than thinking in terms of linear narrative, we might do better to imagine...
It was going to be a roof-raising, hello God hoedown, a complete riot of personal faith, the sentences glinting with rhinestones and Southern Gothic, all of it secured by a narrative raised on sweet tea...
To belong to the city in this way is to anonymise oneself and slip out of the constraints of gender. Lisa Robertson has always been interested ‘in whatever mobilises and rescues the body’,...
Jules Renard was a brilliant noticer of things. Distinguishing quirks and concrete observations usually take precedence over broader typologies. ‘The man of science generalises,’ he wrote,...
Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a...
Age: 22. Time: after 2. RumblingOn western skyline, barrage, tangled tracks, trucks,Jeeps, flags, signposts, dust, oily rags, lorries tumblingOver dark crests, pulverised surface almost liquid,...
All novels are experiments, but the thing that separates a thriller (or any other form with its own section in the bookshop) from ‘literature’ is whose constraints carry the most weight: the...
Shelley’s poetry is full of supernatural phenomena, ‘spirits of the air,/And genii of the evening breeze’. It’s possible to account for them through reference to classical models,...
Words, Isidore Isou thought, had done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, he hoped to make space for a new language to emerge....
The romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. It asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary...
Vagabonds! tells compelling stories of survival, about women seizing agency in spite of the forces ranged against them. Men are largely incidental in this brave new world, when they aren’t in the...
Elif Batuman writes brilliantly about what it is like to be inside a body newly being touched, and touching. Even though novels aren’t actually guidebooks, it does feel like the truth is being verified...
If there are other writers who competed as professional runners, I’m not aware of them. (Samuel Beckett was a good sprinter but that was in his schooldays.) To A.E. Coppard, the importance of running...
Two years after Sam Selvon’s book was published, the racial divisions that plagued West London culminated in the Notting Hill riots. The fighting began in August 1958 when a group of Teddy Boys...
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s diaries and letters demonstrate over and over again how important it was to her that she immerse herself in a milieu or environment. She felt identity above all as a relation....