I t would be very easy for Alice Oswald to get stuck. She had great and deserved success with Dart (2002), a poem that sought to be a river. It wandered from source to sea, taking in voices of...
The Lesser Bohemians, McBride’s second novel, sets itself a challenge: how on earth does anyone ever manage to talk to somebody else? How close in language can, or should, you try to get?
I n 1966, a young writer named Patrick Modiano published his first short story, a satire set in a summer concentration camp called ‘Saint-Tropez-Ravensbrück’. Surrounded by...
To think about Stevens’s life, or Stevens from the perspective of his life, is to be told that your bird of paradise, your parrot or your quetzal, is actually a pigeon or a Farmer Matthews...
I n the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and
I n ‘On the Circuit’, a poem about the circle of purgatory reserved for touring poet-lecturers, W.H. Auden mentioned the moments of unanticipated connection: Or blessed encounter,...
The author of The Girls, Emma Cline, is the same generation as Lena Dunham, the creator of Girls, and reading The Girls, as when I have watched Girls, I felt pained by the theory...
D avid Means wrote a novel. David Means wrote a novel! Reading the hype around Hystopia – the new novel, the first novel, so far the only novel by the American writer David Means –...
Sometimes her novels read as though a French farce were being redescribed by Sartre. Sometimes Hugo (as it were) pitches up for no apparent reason other than to tell the protagonist he needs to sort...
When Robert Lowell was mad he fell in love. Auden noted the warning signals: ‘a) he announces that he is the only living poet b) a romantic and usually platonic attraction to a young girl and c)...
He operates out of unremarkable premises. The smell of peardrops comes from the spray-and-body shop. On the other side it’s paintball: NEMESIS. Come in. Please be careful. Mind your step....
T.S. Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words...
Lesson Three Dad was not dad. Dad was the mad train screaming daily into the station of his home, white-hot brakes shrieking, exploding across the platforms of the rooms. So regular, so on...
I n 2011 Paul Kingsnorth announced his withdrawal from the environmental movement after twenty years of activism. Environmentalists, he complained in a long article published in Orion...
Saki, living a half-hidden life, was a man who saw the hidden wildness of things; if cows can be murderers, ferrets can be gods. His short stories burst with the possibilities of a world in which strangeness...
H enry James liked to represent himself as hopelessly lagging behind his older brother, but he was also very good at turning childish inadequacy to imaginative account. A year after...
‘C ould anything be better than to start off with a fine picture of a sailing ship on the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ Stevie Smith asked,...