The Pillow Book was written in Japan more than a thousand years ago. Little is known about its author, Sei Shonagon, save for what can be deduced from the text itself. In 993, when she was in...
‘What is a ghost?’ Stephen Dedalus asks in Ulysses, and promptly answers his own question. ‘One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change...
He didn’t remake the world in prose again. He tinkered with a couple of abortive projects, but mostly he enjoyed Nancy’s company, grew tomatoes and drank.
‘It was supposed to end in the flood in Florence in 1966,’ she wrote to Stuart Proffitt, her editor at Collins, ‘but I gave up as all the characters would have got so old by that time.’
Rather D.J. Taylor than me, when it comes to untangling the unbelievably complicated and messy love lives of the so-called Horizon circle: the people who clustered adoringly around Cyril...
What’s most unusual about Ducks, Newburyport isn’t its length but the sustained attention it pays to the details of domestic life that usually go unwritten. That its maximalism feels like a provocation...
‘The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while...
The Topeka School (think New York School, or don’t) is more than a confession, an excuse, a romp, a holiday; it uses what has come from Lerner’s earlier experiments in autofiction – the unexpected...
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, when her latest novel arrived in the mail, ‘this book is about Boko Haram???’
Small Strout’s writing is often fuelled by indignation, but it’s directed at the injustices of class and poverty rather than patriarchy. On the whole, with some notable exceptions, she is kind to her...
We first encounter Rachel Fleishman through the eyes of her ex-husband, Toby, who is trying to come to terms with her absence. He notices all the places in his life where she is not....
Every age creates its own Chaucer. For Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary, he was the ‘grant translateur’. For Hoccleve, a disciple, he was ‘my deere maistir’ and ‘the firste fyndere [inventive...
Harold Bloom, who died at the age of 89 just before the publication of The American Canon, made his name in 1973 with The Anxiety of Influence. It was a great title, which soon became a...
After she wrote The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood created sci-fi dystopias – she prefers the term ‘speculative fiction’ – chock-full of viral pandemics, antibiotic resistance, mass flooding...
Bernard de Fallois, a legendary French editor and publisher, died in January 2018. He worked for a long time at Hachette, and set up his own company in 1987. At one point, he was considering...
When David Jones refers to the predicament of persons of Welsh affinity ‘whose “medium” is English’, his use of the word hovers over its painterly sense, as though a choice were involved. But the...
It’s opening night at the National Theatre. The radical writer and director Amma Bonsu, snubbed for decades by the cultural establishment for her uncompromising work (FGM: The Musical;
When I think of J.D. Salinger now – not the books but the man – the thing I find hardest to understand is the moment when, in his early thirties, he began to hide his face. In 1952...