After working on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and...
Always, I am coming home from hunting frogs or standing in the swim of wind beneath the last dyke and the sea;...
Hegel believed that happiness was largely confined to the private life, a view that would scarcely survive a reading of the modern novel. A lot of fiction since the early 20th century takes it...
I Tom Stoppard sold his house in France: ‘I was sick of spending so much time at Gatwick.’ II At the UK Border, I double and treble through the retractable queuing barrier. Now I have...
lost/lust Stumbling under the kapok tree, fevering between its cathedral buttresses, I am loster than lost in a place where every known sound has its counterpart: tap dripping into a metal...
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...