Ten years ago, I wrote a review of an earlier book by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad. The review was spiked, and I don’t have it, or the book, or much memory of...
In a sports magazine in the barbershop I found a photo of a man and woman Sitting on lawn chairs in their underwear, Smiling, like they’d cornered the market On leisure, an ad for Mexican...
Awake at 4 a.m. when the sleeping pills wear off, she finds a voice and writes the poems of her life, ones that will make her a myth like Lazarus, like Lorelei. But now she knows that her conception...
For the murder to make sense, it must be true that somebody isn’t who we think they are – but who do we think they are? How do we know who is and who isn’t what they seem to be? How...
Joan Murray died of a heart defect in 1942, at the age of 24. Her first book, Poems, was published five years later, after her manuscript won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, which was judged by...
We are in the African bush, at night, in the mid-1950s. At a campfire Father Tassin, a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of...
There are writers who know the bus schedule and those who don’t. Lucia Berlin aimed for clarity, directness, but clarity from strange people still sounds strange.
Новичóк This is the deceptive border of the year – its crux – it has unique qualities. It can be disguised as a powder, as a precursor to pesticide....
To convey great effort and mild reluctance, one groans briefly when sitting up in bed. This is sometimes known as prayer. ...
NRS 125.330: Want of understanding. When either of the parties to a marriage for want of understanding shall be incapable of assenting thereto, the marriage shall be void from the time its...
‘Why would they need counselling if they weren’t even awake when it happened?’ asked Bishop Johan Neurdorf, the leader of the Manitoba Colony, a remote Mennonite community in...
The Name After St Sebastian Had his chest Pierced by arrows He was nursed Back to health By a rich widow in Rome With the help Of a blind servant girl Whose soft steps I may have heard Entering...
In June 2002, Tom Pickard moved into a cramped attic in the Hartside Café in Cumbria, perched on Fiends Fell, six miles from Alston, where Pickard had been living. The café sits at...
Karl Ove Knausgaard is perfectly normal, a good deal more ‘normal’, one would say, than most writers and certainly than most first-person writers. The mistake lies in not understanding that...
If you took only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material,...
Swinburne was proud of sticking to his guns. In the dedication to his collected Poems (six volumes, 1904), he declared himself a writer who ‘has nothing to regret and nothing to...
A big book is a big evil. That’s what Callimachus said, but really, what did he know? A book wasn’t a bound and folding thing for him, a codex. He could only have known...
Happiness, I consider in my papery season, did zigzag toward me until later I got hated, in the guise of that demon I was held to be. Now I forget much, in my white fog pierced by rare if...