Is there a moral here about the futility of self-willed ‘identity’? Or is it a cautionary tale about the religion of achievement? Was Rich afraid that her deepest identity, that of a poet, would vanish...
What you get from David Storey’s memoir is a sense of the difficulty of the journey. He wanted to write about his own people and to place himself among them, and to go from there, and take them with...
Jhumpa Lahiri seems most assured in tight spaces. But although she often speaks of her desire for control, she acknowledges its unattainability. There’s a certain thrill in losing control, or in struggling...
Christina Rossetti’s poems dwell on those who are unable to play. Lives are ‘void and brief/And tedious in the barren dusk’ or have been misspent and regretted. Souls are unreachable and unregarded:...
We don’t admire Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963. What we admire is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’....
Atypical poem in Fiona Benson’s first collection, Bright Travellers (2014), begins with a description of a hare: There’s a leveret in...
Readers of Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual can get precise and unfussy answers to any number of questions. Who is responsible for Mike’s version of power dressing? Val, the friend of British nationalists,...
George Meredith couldn’t leave Mary Ellen’s story alone – in novel after novel he returned to portraits of women dissatisfied with their lumbering males, who are always one step behind and too much...
Communication, Jon McGregor suggests, is less about putting the right words in the right order than about context, tone and active interpretation. It’s an idea I’ve come to accept. I’m no longer...
Men fall constantly and embarrassingly in love with her (her seductively brazen author photos, in which she looks a bit like Ingrid Bergman, suggest a reason). At one point, she goes to the cinema for...
Rachel Cusk’s characters are often displaced, alone with the wrong people, blind to (or excessively wedded to) customs and conventions, and lacking in self-knowledge. Second Place seems to me Cusk’s...
The first woman to receive a doctorate in geography from Harvard, Millicent Bingham sacrificed her academic career to finish the editorial work her mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, began. Readers may not agree...
Logorrhoea: Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised...
Long before ecocriticism or the notion of the ‘anthropocene’ or the ‘posthuman’, African indigenous cosmologies offered ways of seeing and interpreting that emphasise the continuity of human and...
Torrey Peters’s treatment of her two central themes – the detransition and the baby – injects realism into some of the most frenzied debates around trans issues. Detransition is not only taboo because...
Exemplary craftsman, incorrigible satyr, subversive joker, avid grievance collector, liberal humanist, good son, bad husband, bountiful benefactor, Philip Roth in his prickly contrarieties aroused an ambivalence...
Poetry can be a radical act of naming and misnaming, of bringing to light the awkward correlations between objects and words. Audre Lorde described it as ‘the way we help give name to the nameless so...
Patricia Lockwood is a generous writer. She seems incapable of resentment and has a Rabelaisian appreciation for the bawdy. She can describe America’s corporate restaurant chains and their blooming onions...