the witches eat your book then you then everything
There are few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers...
The sheep’s severed head seems merely disembodied; floating, not hanging from a hook; eyes creamy and dozing in a sheen of deep thought, as if she remembers the pastures, the smell of shook...
Any perusal of her biographies will be punctuated with an intermittent ‘Yikes!’ and ‘Jesus Christ, Carson.’ Yet the reason we talk about her life so much is because there is something irreducible...
Alan Hollinghurst’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the...
There are so many Stendhals – art historian, music critic, travel writer, novelist, political pundit, opera buff, soldier, bureaucrat, diplomat, sparkling conversationalist and...
Tedious mess or rigorous experiment? Art or ranting? What if the really great thing Acker’s work is saying is that it can be both?
1. mis-dotted morning, how it rises in the mist, how the blotting paper soaks, watercolours, incline of leaf tips, or inclined towards tipped-in tulle, a branchling peels out of its costume,...
Oh to recapture the golden summer I met Allen Ginsberg! That tireless man! – he had within minutes, produced a whole box of photographs of himself, all shaggy and naked, in bed with a blond...
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...