‘I’ll just explain the central situation. Six people are trapped in a lift between two floors of a skyscraper – a musician, a surgeon, a charwoman, a conjuror and his female...
Most readers, it seems, are willing and able to construct complete narratives from even the tiniest snippets of information, whether in the form of lazily written genre fiction or in the artful...
‘Tell me, where does fancy breed?’ In the calyx of the crocus in the springtime, a merry time when the spirit bounds like a feather. And a goatherd, two miles out of Oaxaca, with his...
Private Wing in July Night with its epileptic dreams Is over, and for once there seems To be some flavour in the day. Outside my room – my territory Where the seasons do not enter –...
He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk before him – sate down, took the pen – – found that he knew not what to...
Archimedes thought that he could move the world if only he could get outside of it, and the same idea inspires writers in the transcendental genre of fiction. Find some place sufficiently far out...
Here, with the cloud of a six-figure advance trailing behind her, comes Arundhati Roy: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows...
In the memoirs, autobiographies and biographies of those who were central to the development of Modernism, Mina Loy turns up with a Zelig-like ubiquity. She studied art in Munich at the same time...
This is not the point, but you had only to look at your soft red atlas to have it fall open where years ago you had written PERSIA for some reason, AFGANISTAN and KASHMIR, adrift in your...
On the morning of 16 June, in city after city throughout the world, small groups of people will gather to engage in curious rituals. In New York, some fifty people will each pay $25 to breakfast...
In the early Eighties, British novelists worried a lot about history. Where had it gone, why had it left so few traces, why did it still hurt? How could it simultaneously seem so irrelevant and...
This ought to be a good novel, for it is by a good writer and deals intelligently with a bit of British history that continues to interest us. And it certainly gives pleasure; so it seems a shade...
Most good novelists make life seem more interesting than it is. The very fact that their work offers a continuous aesthetic or psychic frisson is a kind of falsehood, a betrayal of reality; and...
Call it the Zeitgeist, call it the return of the repressed, but personal memoir, intellectual autobiography, or the mixture of literary and confessional writing defined by Nancy Miller as...
Like many people who came to New York City in the high-flying years of the early 20th century, Kenneth Burke approached the city as a work of art. ‘I cannot express it, it is too...
The RamHalf-dead, hit by a car, the whole of its forma jiggle of nerves, like a fish on a lawn.To help finish it off, he asked me to standon its throat, as a friend might ask a friendto hold, with...
The French Writer Raymond Roussel was 56 years old when he left Paris for Sicily in the early summer of 1933. It seems clear he had no intention of ever returning to France. His theatrical...
Minus Ten The snow is blameless. It falls like someone who cannot stop talking, in querulous drifts. It covers the same ground we barely remember, collects evidence wherever we slip. Thaw turns...