After a Spate of Sleet and Hail He dreamed of smoke – An electrical fire? Woke, stumbled Through the house, the smell Vanishing, a wisp rising nightward. Back in bed, restless with the...
– Elvis is dead, the radio said, where it sat behind a fresh baked loaf of bread and broken link of kobasc fetched only lately from Boucherie Hongroise:Still Life without Blue Pitcher. I...
‘It is the fate of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of...
Exalted on towers and posts and fitted with articulated necks that tilt, cock and swivel like the necks of owls, silent and absolute. Like owls, they have a zealous gaze that does not falter,...
Writing in 1973, the Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis argued that, for a number of reasons, his country lacked a genuine crime fiction tradition of its own. For one thing, if Mexican...
for Lucas There is too much light in the world to bear the weight of Euclid, too much fog, with shore birds, bright in the salt-water channels thinning the sands, the Black-Tailed Godwit, the...
Christopher Middleton hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded,...
The year we killed our teacher we were ten, going on eleven. Mitch went first, the terrier, a snappy article with a topknot tied with a tartan ribbon. The morning we saw him we hooted.
By the time the company reconfigured the work plan, I was too old to use any of my skills, But I went along looking for another pile of trinkets, figuring my pockets were hardly full. When we...
On 16 March 1810 a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on...
It’s beautiful, and all that: the corner student with the carpet tunnel or you just don’t know where to get one which is all that matters. I didn’t know but what during our...
Like many British writers in the 1930s, Huxley had been lured to Hollywood by the easy money supposedly on offer from the studios, which liked to parade a certain literary pedigree.
Who invented English literature? As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656–1736), who dominated the publishing business of his day and died a landed gentleman worth a reported...
At some point they got off at Gelsenkirchen, which is on the same train line as Hanover, and while there, had their portraits taken. That’s all the sense I can make of this stopover on...
Here’s a naked fellow dressed up in some clothes, Arrogantly flaunting what he actually loathes – The Savile Row swagger and the nonchalant pose! He’s who he isn’t and he...
Zero K doubles down on Don DeLillo’s inward-looking impulse, but in other ways, length included, it’s his most expansive book since the 1990s. It’s a kind of greatest-hits compilation of earlier...
‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story, as E.M. Forster told us long ago. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.
It’s possible that the expression ‘tearing through a book’ has something to answer for. I read All That Man Is at a not particularly expedient time, furiously, unappeasably,...