Why should writers mind about clothes? More than any other profession they spend their most productive hours alone. They can wear anything – or nothing – and nobody is any the...
Ebenböckstrasse for my mother A plaster – piece of sticking plaster – on the wall Where the doorknob of the cold-water bathroom door might hit. Has hit. A bruise in the other...
She was eating an onion as if it were an apple, keeping her distance from the rest of us gathered there on the shore of the vast and famous volcano lake. It was an interlude for writers at some...
In 1903, W.C. Handy, the self-proclaimed ‘father of the blues’, was touring Mississippi with his band, the Colored Knights of Pythias, when he fell asleep at a railway station in...
Sludge Pit Hole, at Surface Dry day on the plateau when everything is very dry; when stone is bone, butterfly is wire; when everything has exceeded its limit, lost its...
If the world of experimental poetry makes you think of pseudy dudes in black 501s and Doc Martens, then I would prescribe a small daily dose of Philip Terry, for whom being experimental chiefly...
In 1990, when she was 35 years old, Paulina Chiziane became the first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel. She has since published six more books, writing in Portuguese, and is one of...
There’s a strange moment in Ha Jin’s new novel when the narrator, Feng Danlin, an expatriate Chinese journalist writing on culture and politics for an independent news agency based...
here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole...
When I remember my dreams at all, they’re not stories but feelings. I once dreamed I was breastfeeding a flamingo, and I could feel the beak, even in the morning telling, before I saw...
It’s always Roy Fisher who comes to mind when I consider the phenomenon of those who come to know a place, especially a city, through literature, photography, painting, film or music, or...
in memoriam Jenny Diski 1947-2016 Pale duty stamps about in plenty of nothing like the night when you knew everything to time when each step was...
The gradual disappearance of one familiar face after another, to Manchester, or Ibiza, or the ominous-sounding ‘New Zealand’, fills the screen with ghosts, who seem to exist in...
There are a few facts and dates. I would like to do without them, or fiddle with them, in the sense that the person they govern is a great writer, and would have been a great writer without...
I want to suggest that far from the baroque disorder and excess of that ‘magic realism’ with which he is so often taxed, the movement of García Márquez’s paragraphs and the unfolding contents...
The world is packed with scaffolding and empty packing-crates Where this train terminates The humid air is poorly when the clouds are working nights Moths crowd the windows dreaming hard of...
Roland Barthes met Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on 9 December 1976 at a lunch hosted by Edgar Faure, the president of the National Assembly, at the Hôtel de Lassay. Michel...
At the start of Aeschylus’ Oresteia a watchman sees a flaming beacon. This is supposed to be the sign that Troy has fallen and that Agamemnon is coming home from the Trojan war. The...