Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story. The book’s prose is a lucid medium in...
Fanny Howe is so adept at creating floating worlds, gossamer meditations on being and art, that a reader might mistake autobiographical anecdotes for fables. In the final piece in her 2009...
In 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents. She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as ‘George’ instead....
After reading all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in 1945, Edmund Wilson concluded that there was nothing scary about stories full of words like ‘eerie’, ‘unhallowed’,...
Karin Roffman’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The...
Occasionally, really not very often, a translation makes something like a jagged hole in the even surface of literary reception, out of which emerge half-familiar figures, dazzling in their...
One of many remarkable aspects of Egypt’s 2011 revolt was its intense self-consciousness. It wasn’t just that the sit-ins were being broadcast 24 hours a day on satellite TV, with...
Pibroch To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before … At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and...
Chopping up literary activity into manageable portions of relatively similar material is, like butchery, a job that requires both skill and a measure of brutality. Of all the limbs into which...
Before I embarked on Eley Williams, of whom I had read nothing and knew nothing, I flipped through Attrib., her first book of stories. Even on first flip, I got a sense of something I...
The novel that made Niccolò Ammaniti internationally famous, his fourth, Io non ho paura (2001, translated into English by Jonathan Hunt as I’m Not Scared), is set in the long hot...
The mobile home park is stale and tightly packed, like a deck of cards soaked in lager. Antennae surge from every bitumen roof, doubling and trebling in size, outbidding one another for the...
The Whirling Eye (1920) by Thomas W. Benson and Charles S. Wolfe A psychiatrist, visiting an insane asylum, discovers his old friend Professor Mehlman, who declares that he has...
What kind of emotions will we have after the end of the world? When we’re fighting over cans of dog food in the shadow of half-collapsed overpasses, will we observe, in Nietzsche’s...
Die Musik bei einem Hochzeitszug erinnert mich immeran die Musik von Soldaten, die in den Krieg ziehen. Heine June will continue white, with outbreaks of rice; though, given the numbers,...
You could say that in literature you don’t really have a genre until you have a name for it – and the word ‘autobiography’, it turns out, hasn’t been around for...
I don’t know which pronunciation either but will trust an advert that chooses semicolons over em dashes, little Basil Bunting beards in favour of shattered thistledown’s propellers....
‘Tell them all to leave. I won’t look!’ her husband had said. He’d just returned from a visit to town when he said, ‘Tell your boyfriends to leave!’ ‘Oh,...