Romanticism bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all...
Endless heritage beneath the heavenly soundshed. Jet-black amphiboles. Ten varieties of scones in Elie. Giant centipedes and petrified tree stumps of the Devonian fossil record. Pyrope garnets at...
‘Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder,’ JC, the authorial surrogate in J.M. Coetzee’s Diary...
Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would sayscreen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry.In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Wouldride it...
Everyone’s younger sibling was still in a stroller, learning to drink from a cup or put on a dress. Everyone’s mom was overseeing additions to our beige, orange and air-conditioned...
When the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at ‘a time when serious writing...
There are many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the...
‘He affects the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the...
Her sudden, silent prayer was commonplace: to betray but do no harm, to admix guilt with love and that way get the best of it, to let each salty lie roll on her tongue, to gamble with heartbreak,...
Most writers of fiction are interested in anonymity. If they aren’t tickled by the thought when they sit down to write their first books, they get to that point after the first couple...
Do you drop things? Do you trip and hurl cups of tea ahead of you, going upstairs? Do your possessions have a life of their own in which they dither idiotically on your fingertips, then make a...
To interview Marguerite Duras, you had to speak Duras. ‘Durassien’ stood, then and now, for inscrutability. Her novels consist of a succession of paragraphs entire of themselves;...
The last sentence of Poetic Artifice reads: ‘But like all true artificers “I” remains enigmatical, presenting only the words on the page.’ Veronica Forrest-Thomson has...
Address to the Drowned Seaman, in Answer to His Distress Flare at Rockall, Mid-Atlantic, 1944 after ‘Pincher Martin’ You have already drowned, although you think you made it to...
Even with the support of the Shakespearean framework the murder plot seems very thin. All the boldness has gone into the choice of point of view, leaving nothing left over for the world outside the womb.
Britain is good at producing historians, biographers, nature and travel writers and so on, but thanks, perhaps, to a not very extensive magazine infrastructure, powerful marketing departments...
‘I didn’t cross the line, the line crossed me,’ a character in Yuri Herrera’s first book, Trabajos del reino (2004), remarks. In Mexico ‘la...
‘My Type, Your Type’ I am not a type – I never type-speak or leave type-fonts on hands I shake. I expand like a chest of mirrors full of the quiver of knives inside. ...