Wheatley’s writing was the supposed product of her leisure time rather than her enslaved labour. She imitated white aesthetics while drawing attention to her Blackness in ways that mixed humility with...

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In discussions of translation, we hear a lot about difficulty, impossibility, loss, riches, invention, triumph – all justified and interesting avenues. But texts may suggest something else: agreement,...

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Getting the Ick: Consent in Shakespeare

John Kerrigan, 14 December 2023

Consent could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio...

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Paper Grave: On Scholastique Mukasonga

Kevin Okoth, 14 December 2023

The Hutu authorities​ in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga writes in The Barefoot Woman, portrayed the Tutsi as ‘inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate’. Mukasonga’s...

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On Mary Ruefle

Emily Berry, 14 December 2023

American poets have never tired of the wonders of refrigeration. Ever since William Carlos Williams pilfered plums from the icebox there have been songs in praise of fridges and their contents – and...

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The structural jumps and awkward sutures of time in The Fraud are part of its argument. They give additional force to its wider project of showing how the novels of the period 1840-80 were structurally...

Read more about Crushing the Port Glasses: Zadie Smith gets the knives out

This Other Eden is loosely based on what happened on Malaga Island, Maine in 1912, the same year that the first international congress on eugenics was held in London, at which Leonard Darwin, son of Charles,...

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Chairs look at me: ‘Sojourn’

Alex Harvey, 30 November 2023

Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is interested in our relationship to the history we are living through, conscious that no one is fully aware of living in an historical epoch, perhaps as fictional figures can’t...

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Slimed It: On N.K. Jemisin

Francis Gooding, 30 November 2023

H.P.Lovecraft’s name rarely appears today without the requisite condemnation. Yet nobody is really suggesting that we stop reading him, cancel Cthulhu and de-platform the Great Old Ones.

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Water on the Brain: Spurious Ghosts

Dinah Birch, 30 November 2023

Spiritual guidance is rare in Vernon Lee’s stories. Her ghosts are usually the undoing of those who encounter them; they represent compulsive desires rather than fears, and the glamour of history more...

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His Own Dark Mind: Rescuing Lord Byron

Clare Bucknell, 30 November 2023

Byron took from Milton the idea that the mind, being ‘its own place and time’, could be its own hell. Torment in the tales and other ‘dark’ poems may be both a physical space – a dungeon, a set...

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Candy-Assed Name: ‘Demon Copperhead’

John Mullan, 16 November 2023

Barbara Kingsolver’s reason for following the plot of Dickens’s David Copperfield so closely is simple. In the acknowledgments, she thanks Dickens for ‘his impassioned critique of institutional...

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In the crisis-ridden 1930s, Hughes was happy to combine the roles of activist, foreign correspondent and purveyor of agitprop verse. His most inventive and original poetry, however, had other sources,...

Read more about Daddy, ain’t you heard? Langston Hughes’s Journeys

Stamford Hill to Aldgate

Daniel Trilling, 16 November 2023

Alexander Baron was an atheist from a young age, telling his parents that if they insisted on having him bar mitzvahed he would hide a ham sandwich in his pocket and place it on the Torah scrolls during...

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Among the Rouge-Pots: ‘Yellow Book’ Lives

Freya Johnston, 16 November 2023

At a time when there was no female equivalent of the gentleman’s club, the Yellow Book offered a congenial literary space in which men and women could joke, flirt and briefly imagine themselves free...

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I am Pagliacci: Lorrie Moore’s World

Daniel Soar, 2 November 2023

I wanted to be in Lorrie Moore world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle America, usually with disappointed middle-class lives, underwhelming husbands and dysfunctional relationships with...

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For Teju Cole’s protagonist in Tremor, as for many of us, the public reassessment of history has been accompanied by a private reckoning. It isn’t only the external world that has been revealed to...

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You can read Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss as a set of Russian dolls, each containing a different debate about trauma. Small doll: Om’s conversations with Flavia, in which the sex therapist parrots pop-psychology...

Read more about Emotional Support Donkeys: ‘Big Swiss’