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...
Given what it sets out to do, it’s hard to fault The Thursday Murder Club. The sentences flow smoothly, the jokes bob gently along (Chris ‘really took the expression “plain clothes” seriously’)...
You might think that a novelist who works in more than one language would want language itself to become conceptual, to allow for its smoother transposition across borders. But Tawada is fascinated by...
Alberti the writer, first and last, was Alberti the reader, whose attitude towards ancient (and later) texts was anything but passive. He grew up in an age of textual discoveries – the hunting and gathering...
After the publication of Schwartz’s first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum...
Love’s Work is the ‘existential drama’ of a postwar Jewish British woman philosopher, born in London in 1947, who reads books, sits in meetings, falls in love, falls ill, faces death. But it also...
As in dreams, Williams’s surrealism and sundry rabbit holes don’t need to violate the laws of physics to create distinctive, inviting worlds populated by exuberant eccentrics. A yawn, a laugh, an...
Layout on the page is a larger affair than mere punctuation, but punctuation, the set of interruptions that promotes flow, has its own set of powers. It is assumed to be a relatively trivial matter,...
Binyavanga Wainaina belonged to a second-wave, post-independence cohort that could put the past – and the Cold War – behind them without feeling they’d lost track of history: it was Africa’s moment...
Cristina Campo hated modern mass society and detested contemporary Italian literature and art. She considered the world in which she was condemned to live irredeemably ugly. I don’t think I have ever...
‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.