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 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...
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...
The most arresting scene in Beverly, the first book by the American cartoonist Nick Drnaso, arrives midway through a story – one of six – called ‘The Lil’ King’....
In March 1957 Brian O’Nolan – better known under his pen names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen – then aged 45, applied for a series of jobs at the radio...
Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup was a nostalgic book that turned into a prophetic one. First published in 1982 and set towards the end of that decade, it nonetheless recalled...
Gerald Murnane was named after a racehorse. His father, Reginald, was a front man for Teddy Estershank, a professional punter who was banned from being a licensed trainer or registered owner of...
Your spectator is sitting not only In your theatre, but also In the world. ‘I live in dark times,’ Brecht said, but he liked to believe the darkness would end. In the poem...
Johnson’s writing is more industrial than domestic. From an early age, she kept the show on the road.