Dionne Brand writes about pain, but her poems use obscurity and abstraction to keep lyric intimacy at bay. This extends to their multiple first-person subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the...
It’s a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. Joyce talked...
All of David Szalay’s stories point up the body’s indifference to the plans the will seeks to impose, its capacity to torment a person with inappropriate desire, or to carry on regardless of success...
In general, New Left Review is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical about the winners of the day, especially if they happen to be Labour or the Democrats. One envies...
The Stepdaughter (1976), Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine...
Women who write about women drinking and writing and sleeping around have until recently been dismissed as less serious, less ‘universal’, than men who write about men drinking and writing and sleeping...
Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is a built on a hegemony of acquisition....
When Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating...
‘American unreason’ is the atmosphere that pervades Small Rain, which is in part about how a near-death experience puts one in confrontation with the American myths of independence and agency. Garth...
Rochester could ruin anything. ‘Even his most elegant verse often resounds with the crash of breaking glass,’ Barbara Everett wrote. Germaine Greer called him ‘a poet against his better judgment’,...
Isherwood wasn’t quite a social novelist, except he was. He wanted opposing parts of society to work together in his books, and these novels offer places where public and private life are seen magically...
Spending too much time with Tonks will teach you not to take anything she says too seriously. Whichever way you look at them – as confessions of an irrepressible ego; as experiments in whether or not...
The strange pleasure of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover...
Style in Lewis’s prose is a sort of triumph of the will over the external world of people and things, ‘that fat mass you browse on’, as Lewis rather horribly put it. ‘The act of creation ... is...
The titles of Eva Baltasar’s novels gesture at the link between them. In each, the title is both motif and metaphor, conveying something essential about the narrator – an icy exterior for the narrator...
We had been watching The X-Files at a rate of about two episodes a year; I expected to be finished when I was approximately 114 and living in a small fishing village in Japan. But ever since my husband...
Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) is rightly celebrated as a masterwork of literary realism, but it also, quite consistently, makes us wonder whether we know what realism is, or what else...
Those who know Segal’s work are familiar with the story of her childhood, what she called, with some weariness, her ‘ur-story’. Twenty years ago, she compared herself to the Ancient Mariner who ‘in...