Three hundred characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t...
We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first...
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine...
For the past 25 years, Kamila Shamsie has been working on a vast scale. There's a thrill that comes with the grand sweep, the comparison between Western imperialist projects, but Shamsie writes best about...
Konstantin Paustovsky’s fiction tends to be set in public and among strangers, so that one is tempted to think: ‘Aha, the great frieze of society,’ or ‘Is this perhaps social realism?’ But that’s...
Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. In...
Gertrude Trevelyan was enough of a contrarian to steer clear of the decade’s many left-leaning literary networks. Indeed, she seems entirely to have escaped the notice of her contemporaries: quite a...
Unlike Kathryn Scanlan’s short stories, which dispense with context and explication, Kick the Latch is precisely detailed. Her character, Sonia, describes the importance of X-raying horses’ hooves...
It’s wonderful that family turmoil no longer claims space in gay lives, though perhaps a little too good to be true. No false steps on the way to maturity, no floundering – it’s almost as if Brandon...
The story of Macmillan’s marketing and its advertising of a ‘GOLDEN TREASURY SERIES’ of volumes is not just a piece of publishing history, but part of the shift from sacred to secular culture in...
Calvino’s essays are mercurial, and the pleasure of reading them derives from our intimacy with a mind that seems to be operating at one remove from the text, entirely in command of the unruly, antithetical...
This is not a novel full of euphemism or implication. K Patrick has said they set out to write a ‘horny’ novel and this is what we have here – one composed of short, fragmentary (and at times disorienting)...
Most of the labourers have travelled from elsewhere, leaving behind their families. This is their second or third career. ‘I’m still a fisherman,’ a mechanic foreman from Newfoundland tells Katie,...
María Gainza’s idea is that absorption is only one kind of attention: becoming distracted in the course of looking at something might be a sign of meaningful engagement. It’s when María’s mind...
Brandon Som’s poems refuse to confine themselves or their forms to any one thing. All of them enfold and link multiple topics, injustice among them. He writes, as well, to honour people who endured,...
‘Michael’ (Bradley) and ‘Field’ (Cooper) were distraught to be revealed as two people and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf...
Themes that recur in James Purdy’s later work include power struggles (liable to sudden inversions), extreme emotional states (also subject to reversal), and polar contrasts of riches and poverty, youth...
The Portuguese were said to be uniquely at home in the tropics, their colonies places of multiracial harmony. Portugal’s empire was fated to endure. In the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial movements...