Paul Auster’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life. That character...
Hard to imagine a brisker, bleaker opening than this one from the title story of Joy Williams’s 2004 collection, Honoured Guest: She had been having a rough time of it and thought about...
One of Jonathan Swift’s first published poems was a piece of 18 lines called ‘A Description of the Morning’. It was printed anonymously in an April 1709 edition of the Tatler,...
At the beginning of Matthew Griffin’s novel, Wendell, his eighty-something narrator, finds his partner collapsed in their garden, face up in the North Carolina sun. Frank will recover...
‘I am not a dictator,’ the hero of Yasmina Khadra’s latest novel assures himself as his end approaches. ‘I am the uncompromising sentinel, the she-wolf protecting...
Sulphur Long before midday the fierce heat that summer had us pinned in the corners of the converted grain store, sweating it out, man and wife, eyeing each other like traitors, all through that...
for John Berger It was called a hand as proof, spotless and caught like watching a false cuff, kind of. It is a pepper mill or a path like a vision along to the...
The affinity between the Fox, Wolf, Jackal, and several varieties of the Dog, in their external form and several of their properties, is so striking, that they appear to be only varieties of the...
There is no evidence that Rimbaud ever visited Scarborough. Graham Robb At times, it feels like someone else’s dream, copious rain, when it comes, and the sense of Paraclete in every...
We think of immigration as a movement in space, from one country to another. In conventional terms, those who were born in the United States are American; those who were not are immigrants....
Riddle 78 Often I [ ] floods [ ]...
In 1962 the young Ngugi wa Thiong’o had a piece of good fortune. He had left Kenya for Uganda, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate at Makerere, in Kampala. As he explains in Birth...
‘Dear Tenant, Right before my husband left, he did me a good deed. He hung a heavy mirror I had bought at an estate sale, bevelled, gilt, uncommonly clear. It was as though I’d...
‘The good man’s home is a mask,’ Gustave Flaubert wrote when he was 16. Every ideal was a cover for vanity. How could it be otherwise, when our bodies were ‘composed of...
For Mitzi Angel The man using the pay phone on Wall Street, His back to you, is using it as a urinal, And urinating – only logical! Our degradation is complete. The young woman, a...
The Strandir coast begins with a dirt track, the guttural end of tarmac in a waste of bared rock, grass and scree, and empty coves where great white trunks have floated from Siberia: they...
‘The ends of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’
Out of the folds of the heavenly things I was dreaming of Tom Stoppard in a car saying do you want to come look at my etchings and I thought here at last is someone who will know how this drear...