‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...

Thanks to New Directions, Plunket’s two novels are now back in print. On its reissue last year, My Search for Warren Harding was hailed as a comic masterpiece all over again. It’s not as funny as the...

After You Were, I Am was at least a decade in the making, and the strength of the poetry is a measure of the crisis it confronts. Given complete freedom, a tabula rasa, how does a poet begin? And even...

One of the papyri excavated by the archaeologist Heba Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries...

The desire, and ability, to recreate the world around them in accordance with their will is a trait that narcissists, tyrants and artists have in common, and the narrator’s father in Via Gemito is...

Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that...

Putting stand-up at the heart of a campus novel allows Camille Bordas to highlight the awkward fit between the modern university, with its risk-averse corporate structures, and creative work.

James wanted every sentence to be artful. What he could often forget, later in life, is that some sentences just need to say what they need to say. But the prefaces are by no means all mannerism and circumlocution....

There aren’t many novels to which the title Choice could not be attached, and it isn’t clear what makes it particularly appropriate here, shorn of an article, as stark as an abstract noun can be. The...

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

The guiding consciousness of From From feels quadruply alienated: Monica Youn is not fully or comfortably American, not Korean, not an immigrant, permitted neither to see herself as a victim nor to take...

‘First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche,...

Groff is not telling a new story – in fact, it’s a very old one – but it’s inflected by the anxieties and politics of the present moment. Would it have been better if humans just … vanished?...

I am not sure if A.S. Byatt has had a worthy encomium; nor am I sure that I am the one to give it to her. I do know that she is too little read, not quite respected. Some of this is due to the widely...

With scores of copies of each book, many in the world’s most prestigious libraries, Thomas James Wise had put more than a thousand individual fakes into circulation. It was forgery on an industrial scale.

Queneau recognised a gulf between literary French and the contemporary spoken language: ‘I came to realise that modern, written French must free itself from the conventions that still hem it in.’ What...

Is Rachel Cusk’s ​new book a novel, a series of essays or a philosophical inquiry? Parade sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written,...