Robert Lowell has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs...
Shadow Man Shadow man’s still there, his back to it all, huddled over the picnic table, even after Halloween, after the first big December rain, the pre-Christmas all day...
‘My only talent is for comedy,’ Coetzee writes to himself. His writer’s diaries – six small notebooks he kept in the 1970s and 1980s, now housed at the Harry Ransom...
Bellow was in charge of whatever facts he chose to be interested in, and his genius, which can’t be doubted, outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story.
In 1983, Sergei Dovlatov told an interviewer that the literary situation in the Soviet Union was worse than ever. ‘If under Stalin talented writers were at first published, subsequently...
By the end of the 1980s, two formerly arcane disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier...
Remarque apparently knew that The Promised Land would be his last novel, and meant it to be one of his finest, perhaps his masterwork.
By spring 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his...
‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’
Down below Riverside Park, On the river side of the West Side Highway, I walked along the bicycle path The Hudson flows past hugely, Across the way from New Jersey. And on the other side of the...
It was an old book about crime detection, with pictures of murders and the places where they were committed, including street plans showing you how to get there. You were supposed to solve the...
Metaphors. The little devils just wriggle in everywhere. ‘Put a lid on it,’ ‘get stuck in,’ ‘shut your trap’: they’re a routine feature of vernacular...
Devotees of the gritty police procedural must brace themselves for shocks when they enter the world of Fred Vargas, whose fine detective stories have won her three International Daggers. In...
My dark Brazilian friend, seventy years back In Washington. Both of us were foreign, On the edge of Gordon Junior High. After my English prep-school shine wore off, My grades slid down and I lost...
Tumps of fish rotting He couldn’t sell The yellow yard of a cabin I’d gone to a party With friends Who slipped off Among cypress, sometime Before morning, When I was rousted To...
In The Orchid Boat, the most recent of his more than 25 collections, Lee Harwood lights out from his seaside eyrie in Hove to many places, real, dreamed of or imagined: New Zealand,...
If only the stories were not so tempting – but from day one I started to embroider, and in no time was suggesting a country far to the North where fish are as large as dragons, and even...
Michel Houellebecq’s novel about a Muslim takeover of France is a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender.