Iris Origo wrote biographies of an Italian poet, an Italian saint, a merchant from Prato, and Byron’s Italian mistress; her bestselling book was the diary she kept of her experiences on...
‘So I have sailed the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In...
Best known for his short prose sketches, the idiosyncratic Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) liked to call himself a ‘craftsman novelist’, cobbling together ‘a long,...
after Holly Pester I never meant to see you walking out at night, boy gap among the rose-rows, my lulla my lulla my etcetera. I am a mock of atoms. Watching the bone china seethe at dusk, praying...
He watches rubbish television with Véra, he has a dream in which ‘somebody discussed “anti-Semitism in the world of waiters”,’ he has another in which Pelé shoots a football and he lunges to...
A motherless 14-year-old child, unconstrained by society and gender, is being raised by a violent father. Shunned by their community, they live far from others, sustained by hunting and...
Empath to the Punctured Kevlar Helmet World is the head inside. The jump of the optic nerve. Its Uzis are genteel. Its arbiters are deaf. Add to it the lips that are less a grin than a grave....
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...