If most of Crudo is true, then what does the novel gain by being a novel at all? At the back of the book, all the quotations are identified, providing a key of sorts. But Laing’s own Twitter feed...
W here Now is Laura Kasischke’s tenth book of verse (Copper Canyon, £23). She has also written young adult novels, science fiction, historical fiction, books you might label as...
It came to light that mountains were some of the least despondent land formations, that a surprising number of gales didn’t know what it was to howl. The woebegone voice of the willow...
– Lamb Posse is what tops the bill this a.m., Sheriff, Plus your shot of choice, plus a slice of pie, pecan or rhubarb, you pick. – I’ll skip the pie, thank ye, and have a beer...
She knew without looking that the other rooms would be bedrooms, and that this meant there would be six of them in the villa. Three girls and three boys. She couldn’t see any cameras or mikes so...
For Helen at the NPL Behind her now the National History Museum Pocket Microscope she always screwed down to its farthest extension of nested rings, straining to focus the peacock feather...
R upert Thomson’s new novel follows the contours of a remarkable life. Lucy Schwob, born in 1894 to a cultured and prosperous Nantes family, moved to Paris in 1920, where she developed...
E arly in The Mars Room, a bus full of prisoners is being transported upstate from Los Angeles County on Interstate 5, which bisects California’s Central Valley. The bus passes by the...
Powell’s imagination was deeply historical, as Proust’s was not. He was also much more deeply conservative. That could easily have led to a threnody of time past, not individual as in A la...
I n 1968, when not too many people outside Portugal had heard of Fernando Pessoa, now regarded as one of the great Modernist poets, the linguist Roman Jakobson, in collaboration with Luciana...
When Anthony Powell is set beside Proust, it is not the connections between them, but the disparities in reception that are most significant. The literature on Proust is an ocean, at the latest count...
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...
I n 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...
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...
A nge 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...
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...
I t 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...