Pretty Little I’m not lonely because I have secrets; I’m lonely because words can’t bring the past into the present (which amounts to the same thing). ...
‘I love the con, crises are my fuel. It’s the best high … and anaesthetic,’ Clancy Sigal wrote in Black Sunset, a memoir of his Hollywood hustle as an agent in...
In The Portrait of a Lady, Mrs Touchett describes finding Isabel Archer ‘sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death’. She adds,...
populate me animate sensitively the spirit of dwelling behind the big blue harbour storage tanks I would have children in animal masks appearing round lampposts and knowing the names of the...
Ange Mlinko has long presented herself as an enthusiast, a collector, an exhibitor: of experiences and of lore, especially the histories of words. This sensibility, which also inclines towards...
I can see why Clinton might have thought it a neat idea to use a thriller as a pulpit, but a thriller isn’t the ideal place – as if there were an ideal place – to read Clinton’s thoughts on the...
It is probably best not to take advice direct and unfiltered from the animal kingdom – but lemurs are, I think, an exception. They live in matriarchal troops, with an alpha female at...
Scott Fitzgerald spent his declining years in ‘a hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement’. Hollywood, he...
parched, on tight, questioned, invisible, full of so much evolution, now the moment is gone, begin again, my skin, here, my limit of the visible me, I touch it now, is spirit-filled,...
Cahows have a strange wailing mating cry that was once thought by mariners to be the sound of devils. William Strachey writes that the cahows (then called ‘sea owles’), clumsy on land and almost blind...
I was not born here. But it’s here that we feel safe. Above the near- ly clear perpendicular rafters, each split sunbeam apportions its angles over the bald spots, scarves, bedazzled...
Although gamma is the third letter of the ancient Greek alphabet, the fourth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is called Metaphysics Gamma because there are two extant Metaphysics Alphas and...
It is no surprise that Irish studies has become something of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it...
‘We had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the...
i In the midst of this lifelike grief I am stood at the cutlery drawer, and keep on standing here as if I might remember what I came in for, but then I think of something else, and head...
In chronological order, starting with her debut, Sleepwalking, which she wrote as a student at Brown and published in 1982 when she was 23, the page counts of Meg Wolitzer’s novels are:...
There is something generational about the recent revival of interest in the novelist Ann Quin. After scarcely even maintaining a cult reputation among writers in the years since her death,...
my sex enter breakfast truck, the bluebottles performing obsequies to marbled bacon enter girl with manacles. enter so damn adorable. he likes small fuckdoll. girl who looks plaintively at...