Deep in the Valley rich soil drives the mechanism. Grain spills from the husks. Despite the season of recovery, the family is forced to sell up – a lost century becomes a dynasty and the...
The short story is the most popular form for people to practise on in Creative Writing workshops where the craft of making things up is meant to be passed on. Still, contemporary stories are...
Friedrich, the young protagonist of Philip Hensher’s third novel, Pleasured, lives the sort of dismal half-life that was possible in Berlin before the Wall came down, the period when West...
‘Remember the Maine’ was the slogan, but what exactly was to be remembered? That the US warship of that name sank in Havana harbour on 15 February 1898? That the Spanish blew it up?...
At independence from Belgium in June 1960, Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister, inherited a territory the size of India with only 12 African university graduates and no...
House on a Red Cliff There is no mirror in Mirissa the sea is in the leaves the waves are in the palms old languages in the arms of the casuarina pine parampara parampara, from generation to...
The impatience for summer is desire: ritual, imbedded hard as a hinge in the earth’s mesh. From the papery bulb, the spurred, flesh-green horn pushes, straining for air; flexes its...
Morvern Callar, the narrator of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997), reacts to the suicide of her boyfriend by lighting a Silk Cut, opening her Christmas...
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe – about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly...
Q ueenie said, ‘Maybe you better stop calling me that,’ and I said, ‘What?’ ‘Stan doesn’t like it,’ she said. ‘Queenie.’ It was a worse...
They stand here in a shocked silence, these grouped bodies in cold dresses, their eyes downcast; the hands quietly gesture from this flaking grotto of wishes. But something flares in a corner...
Shena Mackay’s latest novel invites you to observe the Zeitgeist of 1997 addling the brains and hearts of quite a large number of Londoners. They seem an incongruous lot, but with her usual...
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. Edvard Munch I Landfill In ways the dead are laid...
‘Soul of the age!’ exclaimed Ben Jonson in the prefatory pages of the First Folio (1616), ‘The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!’ His climactic description was...
‘To write but avoid becoming a “writer”. This feeling against is insistent and true,’ wrote Murray Bail in a diary in London in 1971. Usually it’s the other way...
For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance...
Tristan Corbière’s only book, Les Amours jaunes, has been lost and found and lost again, ignored and praised, forgotten and rediscovered, in happy rotation, ever since it first...
Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a spoiled gift which, as an ugly baby makes us search for deficiencies in its attractive parents, forces us to reconsider its creator’s talents. That...