To read a novel by Helen Garner is to intrude on characters living their lives with no regard for your presence. You wander into their stories with the same sense of abandon with which they...
‘Well, Mr Ammons, it looks as if you really have something here.’ On receiving this verdict from the poet Josephine Miles in 1951, the young Ammons was taken aback: he’d...
Enter chorus. / I am my own chorus. / I think of my chorus as Mr Truman Capote. / He was a good friend, he told me the truth. / You’ll never admit it when you’ve made a mess, / he said to me once /...
In the acknowledgments to Her Body & Other Parties Carmen Maria Machado strikes a note of respect for her predecessors that isn’t far from abasement: ‘Every woman artist who...
XIXThis room now: papers and books: a long drift over tablesover chairs to the floor. She said: ‘You’ll find him hereup to his arse in the tar-pits of poetry: find him lostin some...
Not much is known about Propertius beyond what he says or implies about himself in the four books of elegies he wrote between roughly 30 BC (when he was probably in his mid to late twenties)...
For an unsexy book about sex addiction, you can’t do much better than Leïla Slimani’s Adèle. The new novel from the writer of the bestselling, Prix Goncourt-winning
Ecstasy and chastity. In Alphonse de Lamartine’s two most famous novels, a young man and woman seem to feel for each other what we usually think of as romantic love, but never become...
Is there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print;...
Three men have come to our house in order to remove the furniture. They can carry two chairs apiece, and while one appears to spin a coffee table on his index finger, another heaves a sofa up...
Marginal illustrations depict, with faintly comic Ladybird book fidelity, the metaphorical events of the adjoining poem: Petrarch shot through the heart by an arrow; Petrarch metamorphosing into a laurel...
Obviously, sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s often a way to discuss gender and power. That point, too, is a little tired, worn out from overuse, but it persists as justification for writing about...
The bayonet tip wouldn’t bite at first. Scraped, slid off, like his vest was made of mithril. Lothlorien, Gonvilnd Keys. A gift from the Lady, or Arron Banks. Barings Bank. The plunderous...
Behind its grand and oblique title, derived rather surprisingly from Kipling, Mathias Enard’s new book is a fictional account, no more than novella length, of a visit by Michelangelo to...
Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about how much he used to dread summertime, the expectation it placed on a young man to be swimming or boating with other people. Writing solved this social awkwardness, he felt,...
An anvil takes nine days to fall from heaven to earth. Most gods bigger than most anvils. Confusing for gods to have bodies at all, a stupidity of the system. Let’s say we give up trying to bind gods...
Sarah Perry was raised a Strict Baptist, with a number of exotic beliefs – in the literal existence of the devil, the creation of the earth in six days, the sinfulness of women wearing...
after Baudelaire Like those angels with rough – rough or roughened eyes I’ll come back to the little alcove where you try to fall asleep. I’ll slip in between the sheets...