Jonathan Franzen has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the...
Are Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women.
I am not writing volume three of my autobiography because of possible hurt to vulnerable people. Which does not mean I have novelised autobiography. There are no parallels here to actual people,...
There seems to be something about having the word ‘girl’ in the title of a book that guarantees huge sales. First, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, which I – like many readers, I...
A man with the bulging belly of the rich man of his tribe, Older than middle-aged, and of course with many wives, Possibly the tribal chief but possibly a tribal scribe Who eats and drinks a lot...
Did you take me for a Greek word? Most do, but I pre-date the Greeks. I used to describe a limestone plateau where dusty snakes and small owls lived with a people from whose mouths emerged my...
Mark Greif’s book is a bracingly ambitious attempt at a ‘philosophical history’ of the American mid-century, a chronological account of writers and their ideas. It begins in...
Do nothing, and it’s demolition in slow-mo – roof-drains clog, pitches sag, standing water collects trapping blown dirt off sun-parched ball-fields, silting the pond’s edge to...
‘As I tell my students, if you’re not at a creative impasse, you’re not paying attention,’ the stalled composer who narrates one of the stories in A Hand Reached Down...
‘Structures don’t take to the streets’ was a famous Paris slogan of 1968, ‘Les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue.’ The implication was that structuralists...
ACT ONE [Alone onstage with a coffin. Windchimes] me one: There is a part of me that will always miss what I lost me two: They all said the same thing in their letters. Poor little ____. I...
In Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novel, Rory and Bran, a fantasia on Irish folk themes, Rory’s parents worry about whether he can be trusted to take the cattle to market on his own. They...
I find it hard to believe that Harper Lee was actually in favour of publishing Go Set a Watchman, a rejected manuscript that lay among her papers for more than fifty years. Yet the book...
A Powercut This is what we’ve come to, this damn lift, this blackout, this airlock, this voiceless stop, this empty set, this storm cave, this dead drop, this deaf nut, this dumb waiter,...
When a tiny press called Dorothy published Nell Zink’s first novel, The Wallcreeper, in October, nobody knew much about her. She was American but had lived in Germany for years, though...
‘What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?’ the Red Queen asks in Through the Looking-Glass. The child to whom this question was addressed was in little danger...
I first heard of Benjamin Disraeli in a school assembly when I was ten or eleven. Our headmaster also taught history, and though he was known to us mainly as an expert in horse-drawn...
The oldest joke I know, the oldest joke that a real person quite probably told on a quite probably actual occasion, is one ascribed to Sophocles. Ion of Chios, a lesser poet, claimed he...