I’ve never met anybody who hated as many people as Lillian Ross did. She would count their names off on her fingers, regularly within spitting distance of them, and her voice wasn’t quiet and she...
Only one of Kathleen Collins’s stories was published before she died of breast cancer at the age of 46 in 1988. Only one of her screenplays was made into a film. That film, Losing Ground,...
Andrew Martin’s Early Work functions simultaneously as a celebratory autofiction about literary life in the United States and an indictment of the generation that populates it....
Why has so little of Walter Kempowski’s work appeared in English? In Germany he published forty-odd books but only two of his novels were translated into English during his lifetime: Aus...
Did Shakespeare know they were his ‘last plays’? Or his ‘late romances’? The very terms by which scholars habitually refer to Pericles, The Winter’s Tale,...
In August 1970 Mary Lou Maxwell, a seamstress married to a Reverend Willie Maxwell, was found beaten and strangled to death in her Ford Fairlane on a quiet road near her home outside Alexander...
The wild, dark and very funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut...
Is it possible for Pushkin’s prose to convey to a non-Russian reader something of what makes him so remarkable for Russians, to discover why he is seen as the foundation of Russian language and literature?
In the late 1990s a white teenager called John Walker Lindh converted to Islam and began worshipping at the Islamic Centre of Mill Valley in Marin County, California. Brought up as a Catholic,...
In 1821, aged 17, Aurore Dupin tried to kill herself by riding her horse into a deep river. Twenty-eight years later, Landry, a character in La Petite Fadette, a novel written by Dupin under...
Sometimes you just have to think of England. It may be embarrassing, it may be awful, but it exists. Max Porter’s Lanny – his second novel – is partly about an idea of...
Will Bret Easton Ellis learn anything from this debacle? Of course not. It would be out of character and borderline disappointing if he did.
‘My military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That...
A bid of ‘Misère’ in a game of solo whist means that the player undertakes to lose every trick – it’s a sort of grand slam in reverse. Dag Solstad’s...
There’s a very short story by Diane Williams which came into my mind while I was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and...
Rushing out of the house for an appointment, I grabbed what I thought was Diane Williams’s Collected Stories. When I retrieved the book from my bag, I was surprised to find it was...
Véra Nabokov, Nora Joyce, Ann Malamud, Vivien Eliot – the list of literary victim-wives is long, but none commands as much attention as Zelda Fitzgerald. Recent years have treated...
Luljeta Lleshanaku is an Albanian poet, born in Elbasan in 1968. Following the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985 and the end of dictatorship in Albania in 1990, she was belatedly allowed to attend...