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,...
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,...
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 was working as a part-time bookseller in the university holidays when the Flamingo sales rep stopped by with a proof of Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things. I...
Bunyah is a valley about 300 km north of Sydney in which the Australian poet Les Murray grew up, and to which he returned in 1985 as ‘my refuge and my homeplace’. Over-educated...
The Voynich Manuscript looks unremarkable: a yellowing bundle of cheap vellum pages bound between two wooden boards. The cover is blank. Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in...
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...