The Letter He stooped to assess The scrap of paper drenched with Rain and dried by wind, An ending: ‘One can Love anything, so how much Better it was you.’ Vacation While they...
Beauty is a fight to the finish, though you want to educate the decorum away. Here, in the bruised atmosphere of a tropical storm, we wait for the rain band to diminish, considering horses....
Sex never so much as occurs to Valjean, or indeed to those who adore him – this while Valjean’s creator was enjoying the charms of every chambermaid he could lay his hands on.
T he other day I heard someone summarise the plot of Tim Parks’s new novel. The synopsis went something like this: ‘It’s about a middle-aged writer, whose life is...
O n Saturday , 6 March 1926, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring...
‘T here is something very Far Eastern about this,’ William Empson says in Some Versions of Pastoral, meaning the manner of Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’. The remark...
Sighs & groans. As it crawls to a standstill the train becomes a fortress. Outside: pitiless silence. Emptied sky. Snowbound farms. Ever-deepening blue. The vulnerable economies of owl...
I t isn’t until the halfway point of The Fall Guy, James Lasdun’s thrillerish new novel, that we are treated to its first overtly criminal act: breaking and entering. This book is...
W hy should poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and...
E lsa Morante ’s longest novel, La Storia, or History, is set mostly in Rome during the nine-month Nazi occupation that started in September 1943, and draws on her experience as a woman...
D oes Peter Lake ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue,...
G eorge Saunders has long had a thing for ghosts, especially ghosts who haven’t figured out that they’re dead. The title story of his first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline...
B y 1979, when Rae Armantrout published her second book, The Invention of Hunger, with Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, she was already what much of the literary world would soon learn to...
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T he Christodora of Tim Murphy’s novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the...
H ans Grimmelshausen’s Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, first published in 1668, is one of the great picaresque novels. Like Cervantes and Hašek, Grimmelshausen invented a...
The fate of the earth. The fate of me. The fate of you. The fate of Faisal. The fate of the court where Faisal will plead his case. The fate of the court’s bias. Every court has a bias. It...
T rying 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...