Queneau recognised a gulf between literary French and the contemporary spoken language: ‘I came to realise that modern, written French must free itself from the conventions that still hem it in.’ What...
Is Rachel Cusk’s new book a novel, a series of essays or a philosophical inquiry? Parade sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written,...
Pragmatism wants us to ask, what is the life we want – or think we want? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask, why do we not want to know what we want?
So much in Long Island goes unsaid. It’s a world in which people speak knowledgeably (and sometimes bitchily) about others but reveal little of themselves. As well as secrets, there are problems of...
These days prose poetry often appears, in anglophone poetry at least, as one option among many: free verse, formal verse, prose poetry, erasure poetry, whatever – it’s all good! (It’s not all good.)...
In Mark Twain’s novels, slaves are freed out of Christian charity – someone remembers them in a will. Percival Everett’s plots are more likely to hinge on the use of firearms.
After the moment in You Dreamed of Empires that brings together Moctezuma and Marc Bolan, Álvaro Enrigue has nowhere to go but into reverse. You can’t reinflate a popped balloon, but you can reinstate...
J.G. Ballard was consistent in saying that his imagery came from deep within himself – until it crossed a certain threshold of weirdness, at which point he began to argue (at least some of the time)...
With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with life’ which allowed African Americans to navigate a white world not of their...
Her childhood in rural Warwickshire gave Comyns the material for her first book, Sisters by a River. It was essential to much of what followed in both life and work, though she was lucky to get out of...
Brontë was interested in consequence. She couldn’t care less about why people do the things they do. The fact is that they do them.
Like good theatre, Patrick deWitt's fiction is full of dialogue, quick, eventful, nimble. Then there is the life-altering incident, which is always a monologue delivered centre-stage and projected to the...
So many of Hisham Matar’s themes – trauma and vulnerability, the question of how to oppose authoritarianism, the experience of exile – seem very contemporary. Yet there is something profoundly conservative...
Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work.
As Seamus Heaney’s fame grew, and ‘the N-word’ (Nobel) added lustre, he attracted intrusive commentary. There were ‘feminist uppercuts’ and ‘Marxist flesh wounds’ from the academics. The...
Johnson insisted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,’ and that he would therefore write about anyone or anything if the price were right – a hard-nosed attitude to his craft...
In the shifting, centuries-long history of his reception, Chaucer has been read as both irreverent and pious, experimental and traditional, cosmopolitan and quintessentially English.
Like the inhabitants of other small and remote countries, the Icelander has the choice to go or stay. Halldór Laxness did both. He was a cosmopolitan and a homebody. He yo-yoed. He stayed in Iceland and...