Trying to make sense of Jonathan Lethem’s fiction as a whole is something of a fool’s errand: there is no easily discernible line from the early hipster science fiction to his...
La Belle Ville Passenger jets float silently across the thunderheads in the direction of Chibougamau and Matagami Lake, one after another. Who can say why: the Midsummer Meti Mosquito Festival,...
Every now and then a novelist produces a book that has a novelist at its centre, bearing his actual name (the condition affects males disproportionately) and drawing on aspects of his life...
Like a king from a promontory the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array of barely perceptible movements sustaining balance and attention, and the woodmouse, the shrew, the secondary...
Nell Zink has a great backstory. She’s the woman who came out of nowhere – or, on closer inspection, out of a busy background of Virginia boarding schools, bricklaying, postpunk...
A chance encounter on Christmas Eve ends with Edouard Louis, a student at the École Normale Supérieure, taking a stranger back to his apartment. Louis has struggled with the...
Guapa, a freewheeling and incendiary first novel by Saleem Haddad, is set in an Arab country familiar to many from the newspapers, even though its author won’t let us place it on a map....
Very few significant American poets called as little attention to themselves in their lifetimes as Michael O’Brien, who died last November at the age of 77. Much as with Lorine Niedecker...
If you enjoy the supreme comedy of literary affairs, it makes perfect sense that the Paris Review was once a blunt instrument of the CIA. Arguably, there’s only so much damage one can do...
Like it or not, ‘Orwell’ is a brand: ordinariness, common decency, speaking plain truths to power, a haggard, prophetic gaze.
My brother opened thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body until it wasn’t his body anymore. That’s how Matthew Dickman describes the death, in 2007, of his older...
Come on, let’s start, there’s work to be done, constructing battlements from wooden blocks and a castle keep from cardboard. I play my part, a supporting role building road across the...
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...