She has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting.
The argument laid out in the first four poems of Some Say, Maureen McLane’s newest collection (Farrar, Straus, £20), encapsulates the one she makes in the whole book, and in all her...
What became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image...
Where would I find a hardware store in Marseille? I was on holiday fifty miles north of the city. ‘The Maison Empereur,’ my friend replied. ‘It’s an amazing...
David Wallace’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine...
Alfred Busi, the protagonist of Jim Crace’s new novel, is a songwriter with an enchanting and consoling voice, so celebrated in his home city that, when the book opens, he is about to...
Last orders. I put my cloth to a misty wineglass and twist the shine in like a lightbulb. At the end of my bar, a girl. Maybe twenty. Her back turned on her pint, and a man’s hand spilling...
On 21 April 1930, a fire broke out in the state penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, a wretched, segregated prison where more than 4000 men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the...
When the eponymous hero of the late 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight enters the ‘wyldrenesse of Wyrale’ (wilderness of the Wirral) he encounters...
Han Kang won the International Man Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian and The White Book is the second novel of hers to be published in English since then. This rate of publication...
I am the trout that vanishes Between the stepping stones. I am the elver that lingers Under the little bridge. I am the leveret that breakfasts Close to the fuchsia hedge. I am the stoat that...
Introducing a 1999 edition of Antonio Di Benedetto’s The Silencer, first published in 1964, his fellow novelist Juan José Saer saw the work as belonging to ‘a sort of...
Here – ahem – is a motif that has proved popular in many diverse cultures in many eras: think, for instance of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere; or think if you dare, of your own turbid...
Anne Barton delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were...
The Adulterants is a very funny comedy of arrested development: a coming-of-age novel in which the main character is 33. Ray Morris is a shallow, infantile narcissist reluctantly facing the...
When filming began, Nicholas Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart. Ray said it was ‘a very personal film’ – and as parting gifts go, it...
There, he says His wife has died, he is alone and so we follow him into the storm because he wants to take us out. Out where?There, he says as we turn each black corner, there. A man in grief...
Grace Paley’s suspicion of ‘the absolute line between two points’ may explain why she was so frequently accused of wisdom.