Warmer and warmercreep the late Januarys,disturbed beauty ofprecocious flowers,the ease of a year’s first swim.Pulsing in their silktent in the tree’s crotchthe pine...
Despite the autobiographical elements in his fiction, John McGahern wasn’t especially interested in exploring his own psyche. He rowed in familiar waters because the cadences in the prose and the...
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Translation’ describes a work scene in a convent laundry. Over the bustle of cleaning and ironing, one voice rises...
On the fifth day, we took him to the Kingto be received. The Queen was beside herself.She intoned constantly under her breath,part-lullaby, part-charm, words bubblingout of her mouth like water...
Hooked is most interested in the kinds of aesthetic experience occasioned by works that ‘strike’ us forcibly. Rita Felski describes a writer being ‘hammered by’ Matisse, of Thelma...
In a more just universe, Russell Hoban would be widely celebrated as the author of one of the most ambitious novels of the later 20th century: Riddley Walker (1980). Miserably, though, in much...
H.G. Wells resembled a prosperous small businessman who liked to remind people he had served a term as lord mayor. He talked too much, a failing exacerbated by his reedy, high-pitched voice with lingering...
As if a book as good as this can really be expected to flourish. As if, even in LA, there is a crowd waiting for a meditation on Tuesday Weld, let alone Eleanor Perry, Carole Eastman, Warren Zevon or...
Giovanni Morelli described his method as ‘experimental’, but it might more properly be thought of as comparative. He paid particular attention to ears and fingers, claiming that artists always...
Because the social world is constructed, Malcolm Bull’s sceptical stance can be transformative. You can ‘make less’ of society, in the sense of questioning its apparently inexorable...
A degenerative illness like ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), brings with it something less welcome, an implacable rival narrative. Some such conditions, like multiple sclerosis, can go into remission....
No one to talk to is a factor in interrogation. How would you do pitted against men who need no solace, saying things like, We are not lonely, you are lonely. Your new shoes are pathetic. Do not lounge...
The literary stomach of the world is a goat’s, not a hummingbird’s, and Karl Ove Knausgaard knows it. He tosses us crumpled newspapers, cardboard cups, grocery lists – all the detritus...
Katie Kitamura is interested in the moment when a performance collapses, when the void underneath the expressionless mask is revealed. But sometimes it’s hard to resist being beguiled.
Dense clouds of starlings ripple on our skylines.Wildebeest thunder collectively over the plain.Fireflies blink. Bamboo-forests blossom at once.Round the innocent cell, bacteria follow the...
‘The moonlight drips on the parlour floor;/I shall go mad if no one wipes it up.’ So began E.V. Knox’s parody in the August 1921 issue of Punch.And the moon dripped upon the...
‘Abeginning is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time...
Reading books like this, I feel like a Philip K. Dick character in the grip of wild-eyed madness. I want to run around telling the authors to snap out of it, to stop wasting their time and their Sontag...